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JOAN  AND  PETER 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NKW  YORK  •    BOSTON  •    CHICAGO  -   DALLAS 
ATLANTA  •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  LIMITED 

LONDON  •    BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  LTD. 

TORONTO 


JOAN  AND  PETER 

THE  STORY  OF  AN  EDUCATION 


BY 

H.  G.   WELLS 

Author  of  "Mr.  Britling'Sees  It  Through,"  etc. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1918 

AU  rights  reserved. 


COPYRIGHT,  1918 

BY  H.  G.  WELLS 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.      Published,   September,   1918 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I  PETER'S  PARENTAGE 1 

II  STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL 13 

III  ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD  ? 31 

IV  FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OP  THE  UNIVERSE  ....  59 
V  THE  CHRISTENING 78 

VI    THE  FOURTH  GUARDIAN 102 

VII    THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE  AND  THE  VENERABLE 

BEDE 112 

VIII  THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL  .     .     .  142 

IX  OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL 204 

X  A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS 255 

XI  ADOLESCENCE 282 

XII  THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR 377 

XIII  JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE 443 

XIV  OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  .  .  .  544 


JOAN  AND  PETER 

THE  STORY  OF  AN  EDUCATION 

CHAPTER  THE  FIRST 
PETER'S  PARENTAGE 

§  1 

EARLY  one  summer  morning  in  England,  in  the  year 
1893  in  the  reign — which  seemed  in  those  days  to 
have  been  going  on  for  ever  and  to  be  likely  to  go 
on  for  evermore — of  Queen  Victoria,  there  was  born  a  little 
boy  named  Peter.  Peter  was  a  novel  name  then;  he  was 
before  the  great  crop  of  Peters  who  derived  their  name  from 
Peter  Pan.  He  was  born  with  some  difficulty.  His  father, 
who  had  not  been  to  bed  all  night,  for  the  trouble  of  the 
birth  had  begun  overnight  at  about  nine  o'clock,  was  walk- 
ing about  in  the  garden  in  a  dewy  dawn,  thinking  the  world 
very  dreadful  and  beautiful,  when  he  first  heard  Peter  cry. 
Peter,  he  thought,  made  a  noise  like  a  little  frightened  hen 
that  something  big  had  caught.  .  .  .  Peter's  mother  had 
been  moaning  but  now  she  moaned  no  more,  and  Peter's 
father  stood  outside  and  whispered  ' '  Oh,  God !  Oh !  Damn 
them  and  damn  them!  why  don't  they  tell  me?" 

Then  the  nurse  put  her  head  out  of  the  window;  it  was 
a  casement  window  with  white  roses  about  it;  said  "Every- 
thing's all  right.  I'll  tell  you  when  to  come  in,"  and  van- 
ished again. 

Peter's  father  turned  about  very  sharply  so  that  she 
should  not  see  he  was  fool  enough  to  weep,  and  went  along 
the  flagged  path  to  the  end  of  the  garden,  where  was  the 
little  summer-house  that  looked  over  the  Weald.  But  he 
could  not  see  the  Weald  because  his  tears  blinded  him.  All 
night  Peter's  father  had  been  thinking  what  an  imperfect 

1 


2  JOAN  AND  PETER 

husband  he  had  always  been  and  how  he  had  never  really 
told  his  wife  how  much  he  loved  her,  and  how  indeed  until 
now  he  had  never  understood  how  very  much  he  loved  her, 
and  he  had  been  making  good  resolutions  for  the  future  in 
great  abundance,  in  enormous  abundance,  the  most  remark- 
able good  resolutions,  and  one  waking  nightmare  after  an- 
other had  been  chasing  across  his  mind  nightmares  of  a 
dreadful  dark-grey  world  in  which  there  would  be  no  Dolly, 
no  Dolly  at  all  anywhere,  even  if  you  went  out  into  the 
garden  and  whistled  your  utmost,  and  he  would  be  a  widower 
with  only  one  little  lonely  child  to  console  him.  He  could 
not  imagine  any  other  woman  for  him  but  Dolly. 

The  last  trailing  vestige  of  those  twilight  distresses  van- 
ished when  presently  he  saw  Dolly  looking  tired  indeed  but 
pink  and  healthy,  with  her  hair  almost  roguishly  astray,  and 
the  room  full  of  warm  daylight  from  the  dawn-flushed  sky, 
full  of  fresh  south-west  air  from  the  Sussex  downs,  full  of 
the  sense  of  invincible  life,  and  young  master  Peter,  very 
puckered  and  ugly  and  red  and  pitiful,  in  a  blanket  in  the 
nurse's  arms,  and  Dr.  Fremisson  smirking  behind  her,  en- 
tirely satisfied  with  himself  and  the  universe  and  every  de- 
tail of  it. 

When  Dolly  had  been  kissed  and  whispered  to  they  gave 
Peter  to  his  father  to  hold. 

Peter's  father  had  never  understood  before  that  a  baby  is 
an  exquisite  thing. 


§  2 

The  parents  of  Peter  were  modern  young  people,  and 
Peter  was  no  accidental  intruder.  Their  heads  were  full  of 
new  ideas,  new  that  is  in  the  days  when  Queen  Victoria 
seemed  immortal  and  the  world  settled  for  ever.  They  put 
Peter  in  their  two  sunniest  rooms ;  rarely  were  the  windows 
shut;  his  nursery  was  white  and  green,  bright  with  pretty 
pictures  and  never  without  flowers.  It  had  a  cork  carpet 
and  a  rug  displaying  amusing  black  cats  on  pink,  and  he  was 
weighed  carefully  first  once  a  week  and  then  once  a  month 
until  he  was  four  years  old. 


PETER'S  PARENTAGE  3 

His  father,  whom  everybody  called  Stubbo,  came  of  an 
old  Quaker  stock.  Quakerism  in  its  beginnings  was  a  very 
fine  and  wonderful  religion  indeed,  a  real  research  for  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  on  earth,  a  new  way  of  thinking  and 
living,  but  weaknesses  of  the  mind  and  spirit  brought  it 
back  very  soon  to  a  commoner  texture.  The  Stubland  family 
was  among  those  which  had  been  most  influenced  by  the 
evangelical  wave  of  the  Wesleyan  time.  Peter's  great-grand- 
father, old  Stubland,  the  West-of-England  cloth  manufac- 
turer, was  an  emotional  person  with  pietistic  inclinations 
that  nearly  carried  him  over  at  different  times  to  the  Ply- 
mouth Brethren,  to  the  Wesleyan  Methodists,  and  to  the 
Countess  of  Huntingdon's  connexion.  Religion  was  his  only 
social  recreation,  most  other  things  he  held  to  be  sinful,  and 
his  surplus  energies  went  all  into  the  business.  He  had  an 
aptitude  for  mechanical  organization  and  started  the  York- 
shire factory;  his  son,  still  more  evangelical  and  still  more 
successful,  left  a  business  worth  well  over  two  hundred  thou- 
sand pounds  among  thirteen  children,  of  whom  Peter's 
father  was  the  youngest.  "Stublands"  became  a  limited 
company  with  uncles  Rigby  and  John  as  directors,  and  the 
rest  of  the  family  was  let  loose,  each  one  with  a  nice  little 
secure  six  hundred  a  year  or  thereabouts  from  Stubland  de- 
bentures and  Stubland  ordinary  shares,  to  do  what  it  liked 
in  the  world. 

It  wasn't,  of  course,  told  that  it  could  do  what  it  liked  in 
the  world.  That  it  found  out  for  itself — in  the  teeth  of 
much  early  teaching  to  the  contrary.  That  early  teaching 
had  been  predominantly  prohibitive,  there  had  been  no  end 
of  "thou  shalt  not"  and  very  little  of  "thou  shalt,"  an  irk- 
some teaching  for  young  people  destined  to  leisure.  Man- 
kind was  presented  waiting  about  for  the  Judgment  Day, 
with  Satan  as  busy  as  a  pickpocket  in  a  crowd.  Also  he 
offered  roundabouts  and  cocoanut-shies.  .  .  .  This  family 
doctrine  tallied  so  little  with  the  manifest  circumstances  and 
natural  activity  of  the  young  Stublands  that  it  just  fell  off 
their  young  minds.  The  keynote  of  Stubbo 's  upbringing 
had  been  a  persistent  unanswered  "Why  notf"  to  all  the 
things  he  was  told  not  to  do.  "Why.  not  dance?  Why  not 
go  to  theatres  and  music-halls?  Why  not  make  love?  Why 


4  JOAN  AND  PETER 

not  read  and  quote  this  exciting  new  poetry  of  Swin- 
burne's?" .  .  . 

The  early  'nineties  were  a  period  of  careless  diastole  in 
British  affairs.  There  seemed  to  be  enough  and  to  spare  for 
every  one,  given  only  a  little  generosity.  Peace  dwelt  on  the 
earth  for  ever.  It  was  difficult  to  prove  the  proprietorship 
of  Satan  in  the  roundabouts  and  the  cocoanut-shies.  There 
was  a  general  belief  that  one's  parents  and  grandparents  had 
taken  life  far  too  grimly  and  suspiciously,  a  belief  which, 
indeed,  took  possession  of  Stubbo  before  he  was  in  trousers. 

His  emancipation  was  greatly  aided  by  his  elder  sister 
Phyllis,  a  girl  with  an  abnormal  sense  of  humour.  It  was 
Phyllis  who  brightened  the  Sunday  afternoons,  when  she  and 
her  sister  Phoebe  and  her  brothers  were  supposed  to  be  com- 
mitting passages  of  scripture  to  memory  in  the  attic,  by  the 
invention  of  increasingly  irreligious  Limericks.  Phoebe 
would  sometimes  be  dreadfully  shocked  and  sometimes  join 
in  with  great  vigour  and  glory.  Phyllis  was  also  an  artist 
in  misquotation.  She  began  by  taking  a  facetious  view  of 
the  ark  and  Jonah's  whale,  and  as  her  courage  grew  she 
went  on  to  the  Resurrection.  She  had  a  genius  for  asking 
seemingly  respectful  but  really  destructive  questions  about 
religious  matters,  that  made  her  parents  shy  of  instruction. 
The  Stubland  parents  had  learnt  their  faith  with  more  rever- 
ence than  intelligence  from  their  parents,  who  had  had  it  in 
a  similar  spirit  from,  their  parents,  who  had  had  it  from  their 
parents;  so  that  nobody  had  looked  into  it  closely  for  some 
generations,  and  something  vital  had  evaporated  unsus- 
pected. It  had  evaporated  so  completely  that  when  Peter's 
father  and  Peter's  aunts  and  uncles  came  in  their  turn  as 
children  to  examine  the  precious  casket,  they  not  only  per- 
ceived that  there  was  nothing  in  it,  but  they  could  very  read- 
ily jump  to  the  rash  conclusion  that  there  never  had  been 
anything  in  it.  It  seemed  just  an  odd  blend  of  empty 
resonant  phrases  and  comical  and  sometimes  slightly  im- 
proper stories,  that  lent  themselves  very  pleasantly  to  face- 
tious illustration. 

Stubbo,  as  he  grew  up  under  these  circumstances,  had  not 
so  much  taken  on  the  burthen  of  life  as  thrown  it  off.  He 
decided  he  would  not  go  into  business — business  struck  him 


PETER'S  PARENTAGE  5 

as  a  purely  avaricious  occupation — and  after  a  pleasant  year 
at  Cambridge  he  became  quite  clear  that  the  need  of  the 
world  and  his  temperament  was  Art.  The  world  was  not 
beautiful  enough.  This  was  more  particularly  true  of  the 
human  contribution.  So  he  went  into  Art  to  make  the  world 
more  beautiful,  and  came  up  to  London  to  study  and  to 
wear  a  highly  decorative  blue  linen  blouse  in  private  and  to 
collect  posters — people  then  were  just  beginning  to  collect 
posters. 

From  the  last  stage  of  Quakerism  to  the  last  extremity  of 
decoration  is  but  a  step.  Quite  an  important  section  of  the 
art  world  in  Britain  owes  itself  to  the  Quakers  and  Plymouth 
Brethren,  and  to  the  drab  and  grey  disposition  of  the  sterner 
evangelicals.  It  is  as  if  that  elect  strain  in  the  race  had  shut 
its  eyes  for  a  generation  or  so,  merely  in  order  to  open 
them  again  and  see  brighter.  The  reaction  of  the  revolting 
generation  has  always  been  toward  colour;  the  pyrotechnic 
display  of  the  Omega  workshops  in  London  is  but  the  last 
violent  outbreak  of  the  Quaker  spirit.  Young  Stubland,  a 
quarter  of  a  century  before  the  Omega  enterprise,  was  al- 
ready slaking  a  thirst  for  chromatic  richness  behind  the  lead 
of  William  Morris  and  the  Pre-Raphaelites.  It  took  a  year 
or  so  and  several  teachers  and  much  friendly  frankness  to 
persuade  him  he  could  neither  draw  nor  paint,  and  then  he 
relapsed  into  decoration  and  craftsmanship.  He  beat  out 
copper  into  great  weals  of  pattern  and  he  bound  books 
grossly.  He  spent  some  time  upon  lettering,  and  learnt  how 
to  make  the  simplest  inscription  beautifully  illegible.  He 
decided  to  be  an  architect.  In  the  meantime  he  made  the 
acquaintance  of  a  large  circle  of  artistic  and  literary  people, 
became  a  Fabian  socialist,  abandoned  Stubland  tweeds  for 
fluffy  artistically  dyed  garments,  bicycled  about  a  lot — those 
were  the  early  days  of  the  bicycle,  before  the  automobile 
robbed  it  of  its  glory — talked  endlessly,  and  had  a  very  good 
time.  He  met  his  wife  and  married  her,  and  he  built  his  own 
house  as  a  sample  of  what  he  could  do  as  an  architect. 

It  was,  with  one  exception,  the  only  house  he  ever  built. 
It  was  quite  original  in  design  and  almost  indistinguishable 
from  the  houses  of  a  round  dozen  contemporaries  of  Mr. 
Charles  Voysey.  It  was  a  little  low-browed,  white  house, 


6  JOAN  AND  PETER 

with  an  enormous  and  very  expensive  roof  of  green  slates ;  it 
had  wide,  low  mullioned  casement  windows,  its  rooms  were 
eight  feet  high  and  its  doors  five  foot  seven,  and  all  about  it 
were  enormous  buttresses  fit  to  sustain  a  castle.  It  had  sun- 
traps  and  verandahs  and  a  terrace,  and  it  snuggled  into  the 
ruddy  hillside  and  stared  fatly  out  across  the  Weald  from 
beyond  Limpsfield,  and  it  was  quite  a  jolly  little  house  to 
live  in  when  you  had  learnt  to  be  shorter  than  five  feet  seven 
inches  and  to  dodge  the  low  bits  of  ceiling  and  the  beam  over 
the  ingle-nook. 

And  therein,  to  crown  the  work  of  the  builder,  Peter  was 
born. 

§  3 

Peter's  mother  came  from  quite  a  different  strand  in  the 
complicated  web  of  British  life.  Her  "people" — she  was 
brought  up  to  call  them  that — were  county  people,  but  old- 
fashioned  and  prolific,  and  her  father  had  been  the  sixth  son 
of  a  third  son  and  very  lucky  to  get  a  living.  He  was  the 
Vicar  of  Long  Downport  and  an  early  widower;  his  two 
sons  had  gone  to  Oxford  with  scholarships,  and  Dolly  had 
stayed  at  home,  a  leggy,  dark-eyed  girl  with  a  sceptical  man- 
ner, much  given  to  reading  history.  One  of  her  brothers 
passed  from  Oxford  into  the  higher  division  of  the  Civil 
Service  and  went  to  India ;  the  other  took  to  scornful,  reac- 
tionary journalism,  dramatic  criticism,  musical  comedy  lyrics, 
parody,  and  drink — which  indeed  is  almost  a  necessity  if  a 
man  is  to  stick  to  reactionary  journalism;  this  story  will 
presently  inherit  Joan  from  him ;  she  had  a  galaxy  of  cousins 
who  were  parsons,  missionaries,  schoolmasters,  and  soldiers; 
one  was  an  explorer;  not  one  was  in  business.  Her  father 
was  a  bookish  inattentive  man  who  had  just  missed  a  fellow- 
ship because  of  a  general  discursiveness ;  if  he  could  have  af- 
forded it  he  would  have  been  very  liberal  indeed  in  his  the- 
ology ;  and,  like  grains  of  pepper  amidst  milder  nourishment, 
there  were  all  sorts  of  sceptical  books  about  the  house :  Re- 
nan 's  Life  of  Christ,  Strauss 's  Life  of  Christ,  Gibbon, 
various  eighteenth  century  memoirs,  Huxley's  Essays,  much 
Victor  Hugo,  and  a  "collected"  Shelley,  books  that  his 


PETER'S  PARENTAGE  7 

daughter  read  with  a  resolute  frown,  sitting  for  the  most 
part  with  one  leg  tucked  up  under  her  in  the  chair,  her  chin 
on  her  fists,  and  her  elbows  on  either  side  of  the  volume 
undergoing  assimilation. 

Her  reading  was  historical,  and  her  tendency  romantic. 
Her  private  daydream  through  some  years  of  girlhood  was 
that  she  was  Caesar's  wife.  She  was  present  at  all  his  bat- 
tles, and  sometimes,  when  he  had  had  another  of  his  never 
altogether  fatal  wounds,  she  led  the  army.  Also,  which  was 
a  happy  thought,  she  stabbed  Brutus  first,  and  so  her  Csesar, 
contrariwise  to  history,  reigned  happily  with  her  for  many, 
many  years.  She  would  go  to  sleep  of  a  night  dreaming  of 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Imperator  driving  in  triumph  through  the 
gates  of  Rome  after  some  little  warlike  jaunt.  Sometimes 
she  drove.  And  also  they  came  to  Britain  to  drive  out  the 
Picts  and  Scots,  and  were  quartered  with  her  father  in  Long 
Downport,  conquering  Picts,  Scots,  Danes,  and  the  most 
terrific  anachronisms  with  an  equal  stoutness  and  courage. 
The  private  title  she  bestowed  upon  herself  (and  never  told 
to  any  human  being)  was  ''The  Imperatrix." 

As  she  grew  up  she  became  desirous  of  more  freedom  and 
education.  After  much  argument  with  her  father  she  came 
up  to  an  aunt  in  London,  and  went  to  study  science  in  the 
Huxley  days  as  a  free  student  at  the  Royal  College  of  Sci- 
ence. She  saw  her  future  husband  at  an  art  students' 
soiree,  he  looked  tall  and  bright  and  masterful ;  he  had  a  fine 
profile,  and  his  blond  hair  poured  nobly  off  his  forehead; 
she  did  not  dream  that  Peter's  impatience  for  incarnation 
put  ideas  into  her  head,  she  forgot  her  duty  to  Csesar  and 
imagined  a  devotion  to  art  and  beauty.  They  made  a  pretty 
couple,  and  she  married  amidst  universal  approval — after  a 
slight  dispute  whether  it  was  to  be  a  religious  or  a  civil  mar- 
riage. She  was  married  in  her  father's  church. 

In  the  excitement  of  meeting,  appreciating  and  marrying 
Stubbo,  she  forgot  that  she  had  had  a  great  pity  and  tender- 
ness and  admiration  for  her  shy  and  impulsive  cousin,  Os- 
wald Sydenham,  with  the  glass  eye  and  cruelly  scarred  face, 
who  had  won  the  V.C.  before  he  was  twenty  at  the  bombard- 
ment of  Alexandria,  and  who  had  since  done  the  most  re- 
markable things  in  Nyasaland.  It  had  been  quite  typical 


8  JOAN  AND  PETER 

heroism  that  had  won  him  the  V.C.  He  had  thrown  a  shell 
overboard,  and  it  had  burst  in  the  air  as  he  threw  it  and 
pulped  one  side  of  his  face.  But  when  she  married,  she  had 
temporarily  forgotten  Cousin  Oswald.  She  was  just  carried 
away  by  Arthur  Stubland  's  profile,  and  the  wave  in  his  hair, 
and — life. 

Arthur  was  Stubbo's  Christian  name  because  he  had  been 
born  under  the  spell  of  "The  Idylls  of  the  King." 

Afterwards  when  Oswald  came  home  again,  she  thought 
the  good  side  of  his  face,  the  side  of  his  face  that  hadn't  been 
so  seriously  damaged  by  the  Egyptian  shell,  looked  at  her 
rather  queerly.  But  the  wounded  side  remained  a  Sphinx- 
like  mask. 

"Congratulations!"  said  Oswald,  fumbling  with  the  word. 
"Congratulations!  I  hope  you'll  be  happy,  Dolly."  .  .  . 

She  was  far  gone  in  rationalism  before  she  met  Arthur, 
and  he  completed  her  emancipation.  Their  ideas  ran  closely 
together.  They  projected  some  years  of  travel  before  they 
settled  down.  He  wanted  to  see  mediaeval  Italy  "thor- 
oughly, ' '  and  she  longed  for  Imperial  Rome.  They  took  just 
a  couple  of  rooms  in  South  Kensington  and  spent  all  the  rest 
of  their  income  in  long  stretches  of  holiday.  They  honey- 
mooned in  pleasant  inns  in  South  Germany;  they  did  some 
climbing  in  the  Tyrol  and  the  Dolomites — she  had  a  good 
head — they  had  a  summer  holiday  on  the  Adriatic  coast,  and 
she  learnt  to  swim  and  dive  well,  and  they  did  one  long  knap- 
sack tramp  round  and  along  the  Swiss  Italian  frontier  and 
then  another  through  the  Apennines  to  Florence. 

It  was  a  perfectly  lovely  time.  Everything  was  bright 
and  happy,  and  they  got  on  wonderfully  together,  except 
that There  was  a  shadow  for  her.  She  found  it  diffi- 
cult to  say  exactly  what  the  shadow  was,  and  it  is  still  more 
difficult  for  the  historian  to  define  it.  She  dismissed  the 
idea  that  it  had  anything  to  do  with  Cousin  Oswald's  one 
reproachful  eye.  She  sometimes  had  a  faint  suspicion  that 
it  was  her  jilted  Caesar  asking  for  at  least  a  Rubicon  to 
cross,  but  it  is  doubtful  if  she  ever  had  any  suspicion  of 
Peter,  waiting  outside  the  doors  of  life.  Yet  the  feeling  of 
something  forgotten,  of  something  left  out,  grew  throughout 
those  sunny  days.  It  was  in  some  sweet  meadows  high  up 


PETER'S  PARENTAGE  9 

on  the  great  hill  above  Fiesole,  that  she  tried  to  tell  Arthur 
of  this  vexatious  feeling  of  deficiency. 

Manifestly  she  puzzled  him,  which  was  not  to  be  wondered 
at  since  the  feeling  puzzled  her.  But  it  also  had  a  queer 
effect  of  irritating  him. 

"Arthur,  if  you  always  say  I  don't  love  you,"  she  said, 
''when  I  tell  you  anything,  then  how  can  I  tell  you  anything 
at  all?" 

"Aren't  we  having  the  loveliest  times?"  he  asked. 

"Yes,"  she  said  without  complete  conviction.  "It  isn't 
that." 

"You  admit  you  love  me.  You  admit  you're  having  the 
loveliest  time!" 

She  sat  up  with  her  elbows  on  her  knees  and  her  knuckles 
pressing  her  round,  firm  chin. 

"It's  just  all  one  holiday,"  she  said. 

' '  I  did  some  work  last  month. ' ' 

He  had  planned  three  impossible  houses  and  made  a  most 
amusing  cardboard  model  of  one  of  them.  She  disregarded 
this  plea. 

"When  we  came  up  here  people  were  working  in  the  fields. 
Even  that  pretty  little  girl  among  the  bushes  was  looking 
after  sheep." 

"By  Jove!  I  wish  I  could  paint  her — and  those  Holman 
Hunt-faced  sheep  of  hers.  It's  tantalizing  to  be  able  to  see 
— and  yet  not  to  have  the — the  expressive  gift.  ..." 

"Things  are  going  on  now,  Arthur.  Down  there  in  the 
valley  along  that  white  road,  people  are  going  and  coming. 
.  .  .  There  is  a  busy  little  train  now.  .  .  .  Things  are  hap- 
pening. Things  are  going  to  happen.  And  the  work  that 
goes  on !  The  hard  work !  Today — there  are  thousands  and 
thousands  of  men  in  mines.  Out  of  this  sunshine.  ..." 

There  was  an  interval.  Arthur  rolled  over  on  his  face  to 
look  at  the  minute  railway  and  road  and  river  bed  far  below 
at  the  bottom  of  a  deep  lake  of  pellucid  blue  air. 

"I  don't  agree  with  you,"  he  said  at  last. 

"Too  much  is  happening,"  he  said.  "Noisy,  vulgar  fuss. 
Commercialism,  competition,  factory  production.  Does  it 
make  people  happy?  Look  at  that  horrid  little  railway  dis- 
turbing all  this  beautiful  simple  Tuscan  life.  ..." 


10  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Another  long  pause. 

She  made  a  further  step.  "But  if  something  beautiful  is 
being  destroyed,"  she  tried,  "we  ought  not  to  be  here." 

That  also  took  a  little  time  to  soak  in. 

Then  he  stirred  impatiently. 

"Don't  we,"  he  asked,  "protest?  By  the  mere  act  of  liv- 
ing our  own  lives?  Don't  I,  in  my  small  way,  try  to  do  my 
share  in  the  Restoration  of  Craftsmanship?  Aren't  people 
of  our  sort  doing  something — something  a  little  too  unpre- 
tending to  be  obvious — to  develop  the  conception  of  a  fairer 
and  better,  a  less  hurried,  less  greedy  life  ? ' ' 

He  raised  an  appealing  face  to  her. 

She  sat  with  knitted  brows.  She  did  not  assent,  but  it 
was  difficult  to  argue  her  disaccord. 

He  took  advantage  of  her  pause. 

"Confess,"  he  said,  "you  would  like  to  have  me  a  business 
manager — of  some  big  concern.  Or  a  politician.  You  want 
me  to  be  in  the  scrimmage.  No ! — lording  it  over  the  scrim- 
mage. The  real  things  aren't  done  like  that,  Dolly.  The 
real  things  aren  't  done  like  that ! ' ' 

She  put  her  next  thought  out  in  its  stark  simplicity. 

"Are  we  doing  any  real  thing  in  the  world  at  all?" 

He  did  not  answer  for  some  seconds. 

Then  he  astonished  her  by  losing  his  temper.  It  was  ex- 
actly as  if  her  question  had  probed  down  to  some  secret  sore- 
ness deep  within  him.  "Oh,  damn!"  he  shouted.  "And  on 
this  lovely  morning!  It's  too  bad  of  you,  Dolly!"  It  was 
as  if  he  had  bit  upon  a  tender  tooth.  Perhaps  a  fragment  of 
the  stopping  had  come  out  of  his  Nonconformist  conscience. 

He  knelt  up  and  stared  at  her.  "You  don't  love  this,  any- 
how— whether  you  love  me  or  not. ' ' 

He  tried  to  alter  his  tone  from  a  note  of  sheer  quarrel- 
someness to  badinage.  "You  Blue  Conscience,  you!  You 
Gnawing  Question !  Are  we  doing  anything  real  at  all,  you 
say.  Is  no  one,  then,  to  stand  up  and  meet  the  sunlight  for 
its  own  sake,  when  God  sends  it  to  us?  No!  You  can't 
unsay  it  now."  (Though  she  was  not  unsaying  it.  She 
was  only  trying  for  some  more  acceptable  way  of  saying  it 
over  again.)  "My  day  is  spoilt!  You've  stuck  a  fever 
into  me!" 


PETER'S  PARENTAGE  11 

He  looked  about  him.  He  wanted  some  vivid  gesture. 
' '  Oh,  come  on ! "  he  cried. 

He  sprang  up.  He  gesticulated  over  her.  He  banished 
the  view  with  a  sweep  of  rejection.  "Let  us  go  back  to  the 
inn.  Let  us  take  our  traps  back  to  stuffy  old  Florence.  Let 
us  see  three  churches  and  two  picture-galleries  before  sunset ! 
And  take  our  tickets  for  home.  We  aren't  rushing  and  we 
ought  to  rush.  Life  is  rush.  This  holiday  has  lasted  too 
long,  Dolly." 

"  'Life  is  real!      Life  is  earnest!' 
Simple  joys  are  not  its  goal." 

"Own,  my  Dolly!  If  only  this  afternoon  we  could  find 
some  solid  serious  lecture  down  there!  Or  an  election. 
You'd  love  an  election.  .  .  .  And  anyhow,  it's  nearly  lunch 
time." 

She  knelt,  took  his  hand,  and  stood  up. 

"You  mock,"  she  said.  "But  you  know  that  what  I  want 
to  say — isn't  that.  ..." 

§  4 

He  did  know.  But  all  the  way  back  to  England  he  was  a 
man  with  an  irritating  dart  sticking  in  his  mind.  And  the 
discussion  she  had  released  that  day  worried  him  for  months. 

He  wanted  it  to  be  clear  that  their  lives  were  on  a  very 
high  level  indeed.  No  mere  idlers  were  they.  Hitherto  he 
said  they  had  been  keeping  honeymoon,  but  that  was  only 
before  they  began  life  in  earnest.  Now  they  were  really 
going  to  begin.  They  were  going  to  take  hold  of  life. 

House  and  Peter  followed  quite  logically  upon  that. 

How  easy  was  life  in  those  days — at  least,  for  countless 
thousands  of  independent  people !  It  was  the  age  of  free- 
dom— for  the  independent.  They  went  where  they  listed; 
the  world  was  full  of  good  hotels,  and  every  country  had  its 
Baedeker  well  up  to  date.  Every  cultivated  home  had  its 
little  corner  of  weather-worn  guide  books,  a  nest  of  memories, 
an  Orario,  an  Indicateur,  or  a  Continental  Bradshaw.  The 
happy  multitude  of  the  free  travelled  out  to  beautiful  places 


12  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  returned  to  comfortable  homes.  The  chief  anxiety  in 
life  was  to  get  good  servants — and  there  were  plenty  of  good 
servants.  Politics  went  on,  at  home  and  abroad,  a  traditional 
game  between  the  Ins  and  Outs.  The  world  was  like  a  spin- 
ning top  that  seems  to  be  quite  still  and  stable.  .  .  .  Yet 
youth  was  apt  to  feel  as  Dolly  felt,  that  there  was  something 
lacking. 

Arthur  was  quite  ready  to  fall  in  with  this  idea  that  some- 
thing was  lacking.  He  was  inclined  to  think  that  one  got  to 
the  root  of  it  by  recognizing  that  there  was  not  enough 
Craftsmanship  and  too  much  cheap  material,  too  much  ma- 
chine production,  and,  more  especially,  too  much  aniline  dye. 
He  was  particularly  strong  against  aniline  dyes.  All  Brit- 
ain was  strong  against  aniline  dyes, — and  so  that  trade  went 
to  Germany.  He  reached  socialism  by  way  of  aesthetic  criti- 
cism. Individual  competition  was  making  the  world  hideous. 
It  was  destroying  individuality.  What  the  world  needed 
was  a  non-competitive  communism  for  the  collective  discour- 
agement of  machinery.  (Meanwhile  he  bought  a  bicycle.) 
He  decided  that  his  modest  six  hundred  a  year  was  all  that 
he  and  Dolly  needed  to  live  upon ;  he  would  never  work  for 
money — that  would  be  "sordid" — but  for  the  joy  of  work, 
and  on  his  income  they  would  lead  a  simple  working-man's 
existence,  free  from  the  vulgarities  of  competition,  politics 
and  commercialism. 

Dolly  was  fascinated,  delighted,  terrified  and  assuaged  by 
Peter,  and  Peter  and  a  simple  house  free  also  from  the 
vulgarities  of  modern  mechanism  kept  her  so  busy  with 
only  one  servant  to  help  her,  that  it  was  only  in  odd  times, 
in  the  late  evening  when  the  sky  grew  solemn  or  after  some 
book  had  stirred  her  mind,  that  she  recalled  that  once  oppres- 
sive feeling  of  something  wanting,  something  that  was  still 
wanting.  .  .  . 


CHAPTER  THE  SECOND 

STUBLANDS   IN    COUNCIL, 
§    1 

BUT  although  Dolly  did  not  pursue  her  husband  with 
any  sustained  criticism,  he  seemed  now  to  feel  always 
that  her  attitude  was  critical  and  needed  an  answer. 
The  feeling  made  him  something  of  a  thinker  and  something 
of  a  talker.  Sometimes  the  thinker  was  uppermost,  and  then 
he  would  sit  silent  and  rather  in  profile  (his  profile,  it  has 
already  been  stated,  was  a  good  one,  and  much  enhanced  by 
a  romantic  bang  of  warm  golden  hair  that  hung  down  over 
one  eye),  very  picturesque  in  his  beautiful  blue  linen  blouse, 
listening  to  whatever  was  said ;  and  sometimes  he  would  turn 
upon  the  company  and  talk  with  a  sort  of  experimental  dog- 
matism, as  is  the  way  with  men  a  little  insecure  in  their 
convictions,  but  quite  good  talk.  He  would  talk  of  educa- 
tion, and  work,  and  Peter,  and  of  love  and  beauty,  and  the 
finer  purposes  of  life,  and  things  like  that. 

A  lot  of  talk  came  the  way  of  Peter's  father. 

Along  the  Limpsfield  ridge  and  away  east  and  west  and 
north,  there  was  a  scattered  community  of  congenial  intel- 
lectuals. It  spread  along  the  ridge  beyond  Dorking,  and 
resumed  again  at  Haslemere  and  Hindhead,  where  Grant 
Allen  and  Richard  Le  Gallienne  were  established.  They 
were  mostly  people  of  the  same  detached  and  independent 
class  as  the  Stublands;  they  were  the  children  of  careful 
people  who  had  created  considerable  businesses,  or  the  chil- 
dren of  the  more  successful  of  middle  Victorian  celebrities, 
or  dons,  or  writers  themselves,  or  they  came  from  Hamp- 
stead,  which  was  in  those  days  a  nest  of  considerable  people 's 
children,  inheritors  of  reputations  and  writers  of  memoirs,  an 
hour's  'bus  drive  from  London  and  outside  the  cab  radius. 

13 


14  JOAN  AND  PETER 

A  thin  flavour  of  Hampstead  spread  out,  indeed,  over  all 
Surrey.  Some  of  these  newcomers  lived  in  old  adapted  cot- 
tages; some  of  them  had  built  little  houses  after  the  fashion 
of  the  Stublands ;  some  had  got  into  the  real  old  houses  that 
already  existed.  There  was  much  Sunday  walking  and 
"dropping  in"  and  long  evenings  and  suppers.  Safety 
bicycles  were  coming  into  use  and  greatly  increasing  inter- 
course. And  there  was  a  coming  and  going  of  Stubland 
aunts  and  uncles  and  of  Sydenhams  and  Dolly's  ''people." 
Nearly  all  were  youngish  folk ;  it  was  a  new  generation  and 
a  new  sort  of  population  for  the  countryside.  They  were 
dotted  among  the  farms  and  the  estates  and  preserves  and 
"places"  of  the  old  county  family  pattern.  The  "county" 
wondered  a  little  at  them,  kept  busy  with  horse  and  dog  and 
gun,  and,  except  for  an  occasional  stiff  call,  left  them  alone. 
The  church  lamented  their  neglected  Sabbaths.  The  doctors 
were  not  unfriendly. 

One  of  the  frequent  visitors,  indeed,  at  The  Ingle-Nook — 
that  was  the  name  of  Peter's  birthplace — was  Doctor  Fremis- 
son,  the  local  general  practitioner.  He  was  a  man,  he  said, 
who  liked  ' '  Ideas. ' '  The  aborigines  lacked  Ideas,  it  seemed ; 
but  Stubland  was  a  continual  feast  of  them.  The  doctor's 
diagnosis  of  the  difference  between  these  new  English  and 
the  older  English  of  the  country  rested  entirely  on  the  pres- 
ence or  absence  of  Ideas.  But  there  he  was  wrong.  The 
established  people  were  people  of  fixed  ideas ;  the  immigrants 
had  abandoned  fixed  ideas  for  discussion.  So  far  from  their 
having  no  ideas,  those  occasional  callers  who  came  dropping 
in  so  soon  as  the  Stublands  were  settled  in  The  Ingle-Nook 
before  Peter  was  born,  struck  the  Stublands  as  having  ideas 
like  monstrous  and  insurmountable  cliffs.  To  fling  your 
own  ideas  at  them  was  like  trying  to  lob  stones  into  Zermatt 
from  Macugnana. 

One  day  when  Mrs.  Darcy,  old  Lady  Darcy's  daughter- 
in-law,  had  driven  over,  some  devil  prompted  Arthur  to 
shock  her.  He  talked  his  extremest  Fabianism.  He  would 
have  the  government  control  all  railways,  land,  natural  prod- 
ucts ;  nobody  should  have  a  wage  of  less  than  two  pounds  a 
week ;  the  whole  country  should  be  administered  for  the  uni- 
versal benefit ;  everybody  should  be  educated. 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  15 

' '  I  'm  sure  the  dear  old  Queen  does  all  she  can, ' '  said  Mrs. 
Darcy. 

"I'm  a  democratic  republican,"  said  Arthur. 

He  might  as  well  have  called  himself  a  Christadelphian 
for  any  idea  he  conveyed. 

Presently,  seized  by  a  gust  of  unreasonable  irritation,  he 
went  out  of  the  room. 

"Mr.  Stubland  talks,"  said  Mrs.  Darcy;  "really " 

She  paused.  She  hesitated.  She  spoke  with  a  little  dis- 
arming titter  lest  what  she  said  should  seem  too  dreadful. 
"He  says  such  things.  I  really  believe  he's  more  than  half 
a  Liberal.  There!  You  mustn't  mind  what  I  say,  Mrs. 
Stubland.  ..." 

Dolly,  by  virtue  of  her  vicarage  training,  understood  these 
people  better  than  Peter's  father.  She  had  read  herself  out 
of  the  great  Anglican  culture,  but  she  remembered  things 
from  the  inside.  She  was  still  in  close  touch  with  numerous 
relations  who  were  quite  completely  inside.  Before  the 
little  green  gate  had  clicked  behind  their  departing  backs, 
Arthur  would  protest  to  her  and  heaven  that  these  visitors 
were  impossible,  that  such  visitors  could  not  be,  they  were 
phantoms  or  bad  practical  jokes,  undergraduates  dressed  up 
to  pull  his  leg. 

"They  know  nothing,"  he  said. 

' '  They  know  all  sorts  of  things  you  don 't  know, ' '  she  cor- 
rected. 

"What  do  they  know?  There  isn't  a  topic  one  can  start 
on  which  they  are  not  just  blank. ' ' 

"You  start  the  wrong  topics.  They  can  tell  you  all  sorts 
of  things  about  the  dear  Queen's  grandchildren.  They  know 
things  about  horses.  And  about  regiments  and  barracks. 
Tell  me,  Arthur,  how  is  the  charming  young  Prince  of  Bul- 
garia, who  is  just  getting  married,  related  to  the  late  Prince 
Consort." 

"Damn  their  Royal  Marriages !" 

"If  you  say  that,  then  they  have  an  equal  right  to  say, 
'damn  your  Wildes  and  Beardsleys  and  William  Morrises 
and  Swinburnes.'  ' 

"They  read  nothing." 

"They  read  Mrs.  Henry  Wood.     They  read  lots  of  authors 


16  JOAN  AND  PETER 

you  have  never  heard  of,  nice  authors.  They  read  so  many 
of  them  that  for  the  most  part  they  forget  their  names. 
The  bold  ones  read  Ouida — who  isn't  half  bad.  They  read 
every  scrap  they  can  find  about  the  marriage  of  the  Princess 
Marie  to  the  Crown  Prince  of  Roumania.  Mrs.  Bagshot- 
Fawcett  talked  about  it  yesterday.  It  seems  he's  really  a 
rarer  and  better  sort  of  Hohenzollern  than  the  young  Ger- 
man Emperor,  our  sailor  grandson  that  is.  She  isn't  very 
clear  about  it,  but  she  seems  to  think  that  the  Prince  of 
Hohenzollern  ought  rightfully  to  be  German  Emperor." 

"Oh,  what  rot!" 

"But  perhaps  she's  right.  How  do  you  know?  I  don't. 
She  takes  an  almost  voluptuous  delight  in  the  two  marriage 
ceremonies.  You  know,  I  suppose,  dear,  that  there  were  two 
ceremonies,  a  Protestant  one  and  a  Catholic  one,  because  the 
Roumanian  Hohenzollerns  are  Catholic  Hohenzollerns.  Of 
course,  the  dear  princess  would  become  a  Catholic " 

"Oh,  don't!"  cried  Peter's  father;  "don't!" 

"I  had  to  listen  to  three-quarters  of  an  hour  of  it  yester- 
day. Such  a  happy  and  convenient  occurrence,  the  prin- 
cess's conversion,  but — archly — of  course,  my  dear,  I  suppose 
there's  sometimes  just  a  little  persuasion  in  these  cases." 

"Dolly,  you  go  too  far!" 

"But  that  isn't,  of  course,  the  great  interest  just  at  pres- 
ent. The  great  interest  just  at  present  is  George  and  May. 
You  know  they're  going  to  be  married." 

Arthur  lifted  a  protesting  profile.  "My  dear!  Who  is 
May?"  he  tenored. 

"Aft'ected  ignorance!  She  is  the  Princess  May  who  was 
engaged  to  the  late  Duke  of  Clarence,  the  Princess  Mary  of 
Teck.  And  now  he's  dead,  she's  going  to  marry  the  Duke  of 
York.  Surely  you  understand  about  that.  He  is  your 
Future  Sovereign.  Mrs.  Bagshot-Fawcett  gets  positively 
lush  about  him.  It  was  George  she  always  lurved,  Mrs.  Bag- 
shot-Fawcett says,  but  she  accepted  his  brother  for  Reasons 
of  State.  So  after  all  it's  rather  nice  and  romantic  that  the 
elder  brother " 

Arthur  roared  and  tore  his  hair  and  walked  up  and  down 
the  low  room.  "What  are  these  people  to  me?"  he  shouted. 
"What  are  these  people  to  me?" 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  17 

"But  there  is  twenty  times  as  much  about  that  sort  of 
thing  in  the  papers  as  there  is  about  our  sort  of  things. ' ' 

There  was  no  disputing  it. 

"We're  in  a  foreign  country,"  cried  Arthur,  going  off 
at  a  tangent.  "We're  in  a  foreign  country.  We  English 
are  a  subject  people.  .  .  .  Talk  of  Home  Rule  for  Ireland! 
.  .  .  Why  are  there  no  English  Nationalists?  One  of  these 
days  I  will  hoist  the  cross  of  St.  George  outside  this  cottage. 
But  I  doubt  if  any  one  on  this  countryside  will  know  it  for 
the  English  flag."* 

§  2 

Whatever  is  seems  right,  and  it  is  only  now,  after  five  and 
twenty  years  of  change,  that  we  do  begin  to  see  as  a  remark- 
able thing  the  detached  life  that  great  masses  of  the  English 
were  leading  beneath  the  canopy  of  the  Hanoverian  mon- 
archy. For  in  those  days  the  court  thought  in  German; 
Teutonized  Anglicans,  sentimental,  materialistic  and  reso- 
lutely ' '  loyal, ' '  dominated  society ;  Gladstone  was  notoriously 
disliked  by  them  for  his  anti-German  policy  and  his  Irish  and 
Russian  sympathies,  and  the  old  Queen's  selection  of  bishops 
guided  feeling  in  the  way  it  ought  to  go.  But  there  was  a 
leakage  none  the  less.  More  and  more  people  were  drifting 
out  of  relationship  to  church  and  state,  exactly  as  Peter's 
parents  had  drifted  out.  The  Court  dominated,  but  it  did 
not  dominate  intelligently;  it  controlled  the  church  to  no  ef- 
fect, its  influence  upon  universities  and  schools  and  art  and 
literature  was  merely  deadening ;  it  responded  to  flattery  but 
it  failed  to  direct;  it  was  the  court  of  an  alien-spirited  old 
lady,  making  much  of  the  pathos  of  her  widowhood  and 
trading  still  on  the  gallantry  and  generosity  that  had  wel- 
comed her  as  a  "girl  queen."  The  real  England  separated 
itself  more  and  more  from  that  superficial  England  of  the 
genteel  that  looked  to  Osborne  and  Balmoral.  To  the  real 
England,  dissentient  England,  court  taste  was  a  joke,  court 
art  was  a  scandal ;  of  English  literature  and  science  noto- 
riously the  court  knew  nothing.  In  the  huge  pacific  indus- 
trial individualism  of  Great  Britain  it  did  not  seem  a  serious 
matter  that  the  army  and  navy  and  the  Indian  administra- 


18  JOAN  AND  PETER 

tion  were  orientated  to  the  court,  Peter's  parents  and  the 
large  class  of  detached  people  to  which  they  belonged,  were 
out  of  politics,  out  of  the  system,  scornful,  or  facetious  and 
aloof.  Just  as  they  were  out  of  religion.  These  things  did 
not  concern  them. 

The  great  form  of  the  empire  contained  these  indifferents, 
the  great  roof  of  church  and  state  hung  over  them.  Royal 
visits,  diplomatic  exchanges  and  the  like  passed  to  and  fro, 
alien,  uninteresting  proceedings;  Heligoland  was  given  to 
the  young  Emperor  William  the  Second  by  Lord  Salisbury, 
the  old  Queen's  favourite  prime  minister,  English  politicians 
jostled  the  French  in  Africa  as  roughly  as  possible  to  "larn 
them  to  be"  republicans,  and  resisted  the  Home  Rule  aspira- 
tions and  the  ill-concealed  republicanism  of  the  "Keltic 
fringe";  one's  Anglican  neighbours  of  the  "ruling  class" 
went  off  to  rule  India  and  the  empire  with  manners  that 
would  have  maddened  Job;  they  stood  for  Parliament  and 
played  the  game  of  politics  upon  factitious  issues.  Sir 
Charles  Dilke,  the  last  of  the  English  Republicans,  and 
Charles  Stewart  Parnell,  the  uncrowned  King  of  Ireland, 
had  both  been  extinguished  by  opportune  divorce  cases. 
(Liberal  opinion,  it  was  felt,  must  choose  between  the  pri- 
vate and  the  public  life.  You  could  not  have  it  both  ways.) 
It  did  not  seem  to  be  a  state  of  affairs  to  make  a  fuss  about. 
The  general  life  went  on  comfortably  enough.  We  built  our 
pretty  rough-cast  houses,  taught  Shirley  poppies  to  spring 
artlessly  between  the  paving-stones  in  our  garden  paths,  be- 
got the  happy  children  who  were  to  grow  up  under  that  roof 
of  a  dynastic  system  that  was  never  going  to  fall  in.  (Be- 
cause it  never  had  fallen  in.) 

Never  before  had  nurseries  been  so  pretty  as  they  were  in 
that  glowing  pause  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

Peter's  nursery  was  a  perfect  room  in  which  to  hatch  the 
soul  of  a  little  boy.  Its  walls  were  done  in  a  warm  cream- 
coloured  paint,  and  upon  them  Peter's  father  had  put  the 
most  lovely  pattern  of  trotting  and  jumping  horses  and  danc- 
ing cats  and  dogs  and  leaping  lambs,  a  carnival  of  beasts. 
He  had  copied  these  figures  from  books,  enlarging  them  as  he 
did  so ;  he  had  cut  them  out  in  paper,  stuck  them  on  the  wall, 
and  then  flicked  bright  blue  paint  at  them  until  they  were  all 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  19 

outlined  in  a  penumbra  of  stippled  blue.  Then  he  unpinned 
the  paper  and  took  it  on  to  another  part  of  the  wall  and  so 
made  his  pattern.  There  was  a  big  brass  fireguard  in  Peter's 
nursery  that  hooked  on  to  the  jambs  of  the  fireplace,  and  all 
the  tables  had  smoothly  rounded  corners  against  the  days 
when  Peter  would  run  about.  The  floor  was  of  cork  carpet 
on  which  Peter  would  put  his  toys,  and  there  was  a  crimson 
hearthrug  on  which  Peter  was  destined  to  crawl.  And  a 
number  of  stuffed  dogs  and  elephants,  whose  bead  eyes  had 
been  carefully  removed  by  Dolly  and  replaced  with  eyes  of 
black  cloth  that  Peter  would  be  less  likely  to  worry  off  and 
swallow,  awaited  his  maturing  clutch.  (But  there  were  no 
Teddy  Bears  yet;  Teddy  Bears  had  still  to  come  into  the 
world.  America  had  still  to  discover  the  charm  of  its 
Teddy.)  There  were  scales  in  Peter's  nursery  to  weigh 
Peter  every  week,  and  tables  to  show  how  much  he  ought  to 
weigh  and  when  one  should  begin  to  feel  anxious.  There 
was  nothing  casual  about  the  early  years  of  Peter. 

Peter  began  well,  a  remarkably  fine  child,  Dr.  Fremisson 
said,  of  nine  pounds.  Although  he  was  born  in  warm  sum- 
mer weather  we  never  went  back  upon  that.  He  favoured 
his  mother  perhaps  more  than  an  impartial  child  should,  but 
that  was  at  any  rate  a  source  of  satisfaction  to  Cousin  Oswald 
(of  the  artificial  eye). 

Cousin  Oswald  was  doing  his  best  to  behave  nicely  and 
persuade  himself  that  all  this  show  had  been  got  up  by 
Dolly  and  was  Dolly's  show — and  that  Arthur  just  hap- 
pened to  be  about. 

"Look  at  him,"  said  Cousin  Oswald  as  Peter  regarded  the 
world  with  unwinking  intelligence  from  behind  an  appre- 
ciated bottle;  "the  Luck  of  him.  He's  the  Heir  of  the  Ages. 
Look  at  this  room  and  this  house  and  every  one  about  him." 

Dolly  remarked  foolishly  that  Peter  was  a  "nittle  darum. 
'E  dizzerves-i-tall.  Nevything." 

"The  very  sunshine  on  the  wall  looks  as  though  it  had 
been  got  for  him  specially,"  said  Cousin  Oswald. 

"It  was  got  for  him  specially,"  said  Dolly,  with  a  light  of 
amusement  in  her  eyes  that  reminded  him  of  former  times. 

This  visit  was  a  great  occasion.  It  was  the  first  time 
Cousin  Oswald  had  seen  either  Arthur  or  Peter.  Almost 


20 

directly  after  he  had  learnt  about  Dolly's  engagement  and 
jerked  out  his  congratulations,  he  had  cut  short  his  holiday 
in  England  and  gone  back  to  Central  Africa.  Now  he  was 
in  England  again,  looked  baked  and  hard,  and  his  hair,  which 
had  always  been  stubby,  more  stubby  than  ever.  The  scarred 
half  of  him  had  lost  its  harsh  redness  and  become  brown. 
He  was  staying  with  his  aunt,  Dolly's  second  cousin  by  mar- 
riage, Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham,  not  ten  miles  away  towards 
Tonbridge,  and  he  took  to  bicycling  over  to  The  Ingle-Nook 
every  other  day  or  so  and  gossiping. 

"These  bicycles,"  he  said,  "are  most  useful  things.  "Won- 
derful things.  As  soon  as  they  get  cheap — bound  to  get 
cheap — they  will  play  a  wonderful  part  in  Central  Africa." 

"But  there  are  no  roads  in  Central  Africa!"  said  Arthur. 

"Better.  Foot  tracks  padded  by  bare  feet  for  generations. 
You  could  ride  for  hundreds  of  miles  without  dismount- 
ing  " 

"Compared  with  our  little  black  babies,"  said  Cousin 
Oswald, ' '  Peter  seems  immobile.  He 's  like  a  baby  on  a  lotus 
flower  meditating  existence.  Those  others  are  like  young 
black  indiarubber  kittens — all  acrawl.  But  then  they've 
got  to  look  sharp  and  run  for  themselves  as  soon  as  possible, 
and  he  hasn't.  .  .  .  Things  happen  there." 

"I  wonder,"  said  Arthur  in  his  lifting  tenor,  "how  far 
all  this  opening  up  of  Africa  to  civilization  and  gin  and 
Bibles  is  justifiable." 

The  one  living  eye  glared  at  him.  "It  isn't  exactly  like 
that, ' '  said  Oswald  stiffly,  and  offered  no  occasion  for  further 
controversy  at  the  moment. 

The  conversation  hung  for  a  little  while.  Dolly  wanted 
to  say  to  her  cousin:  "He  isn't  thinking  of  you.  It's  just 
his  way  of  generalizing  about  things.  ..." 

"Anyhow  this  young  man  has  a  tremendous  future,"  said 
Oswald,  going  back  to  the  original  topic.  "Think  of  what 
lies  before  him.  Never  has  the  world  been  so  safe  and  set- 
tled— most  of  it  that  is — as  it  is  now.  I  suppose  really  the 
world's  hardly  begun  to  touch  education.  In  this  house 
everything  seems  educational — pictures,  toys,  everything. 
When  one  sees  how  small  niggers  can  be  moulded  and  changed 
even  in  a  missionary  school,  it  makes  one  think.  I  wish  I 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  21 

knew  more  about  education.  I  lie  awake  at  nights  thinking  of 
the  man  I  might  be,  if  I  knew  all  I  don't  know,  and  of  all  I 
could  do  if  I  did.  And  it's  the  same  with  others.  Every 
one  who  seems  worth  anything  seems  regretting  his  educa- 
tion wasn't  better.  Hitherto  of  course  there's  always  been 
wars,  interruptions,  religious  rows;  the  world's  been  con- 
fused and  poor,  a  thorough  muddle;  there's  never  been  a 
real  planned  education  for  people.  Just  scraps  and  hints. 
But  we're  changing  all  that.  Here's  a  big  safe  world  at 
last.  No  wars  in  Europe  since  '71  and  no  likelihood  in  our 
time  of  any  more  big  wars.  Things  settle  down.  And  he 
comes  in  for  it  all. ' ' 

"I  hope  all  this  settling  down  won't  make  the  world  too 
monotonous, ' '  said  Arthur. 

"You  artists  and  writers  have  got  to  see  to  that.  No,  I 
don't  see  it  getting  monotonous.  There's  always  differences 
of  climate  and  colour.  Temperament.  All  sorts  of  differ- 
ences. ' ' 

"And  Nature,"  said  Arthur  profoundly.  "Old  Mother 
Nature." 

"Have  you  christened  Peter  yet?"  Oswald  asked  abruptly. 

"He's  not  going  to  be  christened,"  said  Dolly.  "Not 
until  he  asks  to  be.  We've  just  registered  him.  He's  a 
registered  baby. ' ' 

"So  he  won't  have  two  godfathers  and  a  godmother  to  be 
damned  for  him. ' ' 

"We've  weighed  the  risk,"  said  Arthur. 

"He  might  have  a  godfather  just — pour  rire,"  said  Os- 
wald. 

"That's  different,"  Dolly  encouraged  promptly.  "We 
must  get  him  one. ' ' 

"I'd  like  to  be  Peter's  godfather,"  said  Oswald. 

' '  I  will  deny  him  no  advantage, ' '  said  Arthur.  ' '  The  cere- 
mony   The  ceremony  shall  be  a  simple  one.  Godfather, 

Peter;  Peter,  godfather.  Peter,  my  son,  salute  your  god- 
father." 

Oswald  seemed  trying  to  remember  a  formula.  ' '  I  promise 
and  vow  three  things  in  his  name ;  first  a  beautiful  mug ; 
secondly  that  he  shall  be  duly  instructed  in  chemistry, 
biology,  mathematics,  the  French  and  German  tongues  and 


22  JOAN  AND  PETER 

all  that  sort  of  thing;  and  thirdly,  that — what  is  thirdly? 
That  he  shall  renounce  the  devil  and  all  his  works.  But 
there  isn  't  a  devil  nowadays. ' ' 

Peter  having  consumed  his  bottle  to  the  dregs  and  dreamt 
over  it  for  a  space,  now  thrust  it  from  him  and  turning  to- 
wards Oswald,  regurgitated — but  within  the  limits  of  nur- 
sery good  manners.  Then  he  smiled  a  toothless,  slightly 
derisive  smile. 

" Intelligent  'e  is!"  crooned  Dolly.  "Unstand  evlyfling 
'e  does.  .  ." 


§  3 

This  conversation  about  Peter's  future,  once  it  had  been 
started,  rambled  on  for  the  next  three  weeks,  and  then 
Oswald  very  abruptly  saw  fit  to  be  called  away  to  Africa 
again.  .  .  . 

Various  interlocutors  dropped  in  while  that  talk  was  in 
progress.  Arthur  felt  his  way  to  his  real  opinions  through 
a  series  of  experimental  dogmas. 

Arthur's  disposition  was  towards  an  extreme  Rousseauism. 
It  is  the  tendency  of  the  interrogative  class  in  all  settled 
communities.  He  thought  that  a  boy  or  girl  ought  to  run 
wild  until  twelve  and  not  be  bothered  by  lessons,  ought  to  eat 
little  else  but  fruit  and  nuts,  go  bareheaded  and  barefooted. 
Why  not?  Oswald's  disposition  would  have  been  to  oppose 
Arthur  anyhow,  but  against  these  views  all  his  circle  of 
ideas  fought  by  necessity.  If  Arthur  was  Ruskinite  and 
Morrisite,  Oswald  was  as  completely  Huxleyite.  If  Arthur 
thought  the  world  perishing  for  need  of  Art  and  Nature, 
Oswald  stood  as  strongly  for  the  saving  power  of  Science. 
In  this  matter  of  bare  feet — 

"There's  thorns,  pins,  snakes,  tetanus,"  reflected  Os- 
wald. 

"The  foot  hardens." 

"Only  the  sole,"  said  Oswald.     "And  not  enough." 

"Shielded  from  all  the  corruptions  of  town  arid  society," 
said  Arthur  presently. 

"There's  no  such  corruptor  as  that  old  Mother  Nature  of 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  23 

yours.  You  daren  't  leave  that  bottle  of  milk  to  her  for  half 
an  hour  but  what  she  turns  it  sour  or  poisons  it  with  one  of 
her  beastly  germs." 

' '  I  never  approved  of  the  bottle, ' '  said  Arthur,  bringing  a 
flash  of  hot  resentment  into  Dolly's  eyes.  .  .  . 

Oswald  regretted  his  illustration. 

"Old  Mother  Nature  is  a  half-wit,"  he  said.  "She's  dis- 
traught. You  overrate  the  jade.  She's  thinking  of  every- 
thing at  once.  All  her  affairs  got  into  a  hopeless  mess  from 
the  very  start.  Most  of  her  world  is  desert  with  water  run- 
ning to  waste.  A  tropical  forest  is  three-quarters  death  and 
decay,  and  what  is  alive  is  either  murdering  or  being  mur- 
dered. It's  only  when  you  come  to  artificial  things,  such  as 
a  ploughed  field,  for  example,  that  you  get  space  and  health 
and  every  blade  doing  its  best. ' ' 

"I  don't  call  a  ploughed  field  an  artificial  thing,"  said 
Arthur. 

"But  it  is,"  said  Oswald. 

Dr.  Fremisson  was  dragged  into  this  dispute.  "A 
ploughed  field,"  he  maintained,  "is  part  of  the  natural  life 
of  man. ' ' 

"Like  boots  and  reading." 

"I  wouldn't  say  that,"  said  Dr.  Fremisson  warily.  He 
had  the  usual  general  practitioner's  belief  that  any  education 
whatever  is  a  terrible  strain  on  the  young,  and  he  was  quite 
on  the  side  of  Rousseau  and  Arthur  in  that  matter.  More- 
over, as  a  result  of  his  professional  endeavours  he  had  been 
forced  to  a  belief  that  Nature's  remedies  are  the  best. 

"  I  'd  like  to  know  j  ust  what  does  belong  to  the  natural  life 
of  man  and  what  is  artificial,"  said  Oswald.  "If  a  ploughed 
field  belongs  then  a  plough  belongs.  And  if  a  plough  be- 
longs a  foundry  belongs — and  a  coal  mine.  And  you 
wouldn't  plough  in  bare  feet — not  in  those  "Weald  Clays 
down  there?  You  want  good  stout  boots  for  those.  And 
you'd  let  your  ploughman  read  at  least  a  calendar?  Boots 
and  books  come  in,  you  see." 

"You're  a  perfect  lawyer,  Mr.  Sydenham,"  said  the  doctor, 
and  pretended  the  discussion  had  become  fanciful.  .  .  . 

"But  you'll  not  leave  him  to  go  unlettered  until  he  is  half 


24  JOAN  AND  PETER 

grown  up ! "  said  Oswald  to  Dolly  in  real  distress.  ' '  It 's  so 
easy  to  teach  'em  to  read  early  and  so  hard  later.  I  remem- 
ber my  little  brother.  ..." 

"I  am  the  mother  and  I  nmth,"  said  Dolly.  "When 
Peter  displays  the  slightest  interest  in  the  alphabet,  the  alpha- 
bet it  shall  be." 

Oswald  felt  reassured.  He  had  a  curious  confidence  that 
Dolly  could  be  trusted  to  protect  his  godchild. 


§4 

One  day  Aunt  Phyllis  and  Aunt  Phoebe  came  down. 

Both  sisters  participated  in  the  Stubland  break  back  to 
colour,  but  while  Aunt  Phyllis  was  a  wit  and  her  hats  a  spree 
Aunt  Phoebe  was  fantastically  serious  and  her  hats  went  be- 
yond a  joke.  They  got  their  stuffs  apparently  from  the 
shop  of  William  Morris  and  Co.,  they  had  their  dresses  built 
upon  Pre-Raphaelite  lines,  they  did  their  hair  plainly  and 
simply  but  very  carelessly,  and  their  hats  were  noble  brim- 
mers or  extravagant  toques.  Their  profiles  were  as  fine  al- 
most as  Arthur's,  a  type  of  profile  not  so  suitable  for  young 
women  as  for  golden  youth.  They  were  bright-eyed  and  a 
little  convulsive  in  their  movements.  Beneath  these  extrav- 
agances and  a  certain  conversational  wildness  they  lived 
nervously  austere  lives.  They  were  greatly  delighted  with 
Peter,  but  they  did  not  know  what  to  do  with  him.  Phyllis 
held  him  rather  better  than  Phoebe,  but  Phoebe  with  her 
chatelaine  amused  him  rather  more  than  Phyllis. 

' '  How  happy  a  tinker 's  baby  must  be, ' '  said  Aunt  Phoebe, 
rattling  her  trinkets:  "Or  a  tin-smith's." 

"I  begin  to  see  some  use  in  a  Hindoo  woman's  bangles," 
said  Aunt  Phyllis,  "or  in  that  clatter  machine  of  yours, 
Phoebe.  Every  young  mother  should  rattle.  Make  a  note  of 
it,  Phoebe  dear,  for  your  book.  ..." 

"Whatever  you  do  with  him,  Dolly,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe, 
"teach  him  anyhow  to  respect  women  and  treat  them  as  his 
equals.  From  the  Very  First." 

' '  Meaning  votes, ' '  said  Aunt  Phyllis.  ' '  Didums  want  give 
urn's  mummy  a  Vote  den." 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  25 

"Never  let  him  touch  butcher's  meat  in  any  shape  or 
form, ' '  said  Aunt  Phoebe.  ' '  Once  a  human  child  tastes  blood 
the  mischief  is  done." 

"Avoid  patriotic  songs  and  symbols,"  prompted  Aunt 
Phyllis,  who  had  heard  these  ideas  already  in  the  train  com- 
ing down. 

"And  never  buy  him  toy  soldiers,  drums,  guns,  trumpets. 
These  things  soak  deeper  into  the  mind  than  people  suppose. 
They  make  wickedness  domestic.  .  .  .  Surround  him  with 
beautiful  things.  Accustom  him " 

She  winced  that  Arthur  should  hear  her,  but  she  spoke  as 
one  having  a  duty  to  perform. 

"Accustom  him  to  the  nude,  Dolly,  from  his  early  years. 
Associate  it  with  innocent  amusements.  Retrieve  the  fall. 
Never  let  him  wear  a  hat  upon  his  head  nor  boots  upon  his 
feet.  As  soon  tie  him  up  into  a  papoose.  As  soon  tight- 
lace.  A  child's  first  years  should  be  one  long  dream  of  love- 
liness and  spontaneous  activity." 

But  at  this  point  Peter  betrayed  signs  that  he  found  his 
aunts  overstimulating.  He  released  his  grip  upon  the  thim- 
ble-case of  the  chatelaine.  His  face  puckered,  ridges  and 
waves  and  puckers  of  pink  fatness  ran  distractedly  over  it, 
and  he  threw  his  head  back  and  opened  a  large  square  tooth- 
less mouth. 

"Mary,"  cried  Dolly,  and  a  comfortable  presence  that  had 
been  hovering  mistrustfully  outside  the  door  ever  since  the 
aunts  appeared,  entered  with  alacrity  and  bore  Peter  pro- 
tectingly  away. 

"He  must  be  almost  entirely  lungs,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe, 
when  her  voice  could  be  heard  through  the  receding  bawl. 
"Other  internal  organs  no  doubt  develop  later." 

' '  Come  out  to  the  stone  table  under  the  roses, ' '  said  Dolly. 
"We  argue  there  about  Peter's  upbringing  almost  every 
afternoon. ' ' 

"Argue,  I  grant  you,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe,  following  her 
hostess  and  dangling  her  chatelaine  from  one  hand  as  if  to 
illustrate  her  remarks,  "but  argue  rightly." 

When  Oswald  came  over  in  the  afternoon  he  was  disposed 
to  regard  the  two  aunts  as  serious  reinforcements  to  Arthur's 
educational  heresies.  Phyllis  and  Phosbe  were  a  little  in- 


26  JOAN  AND  PETER 

clined  to  be  shy  with  him  as  a  strange  man,  and  he  and 
Arthur  did  most  of  the  talking,  but  they  made  their  posi- 
tions plain  by  occasional  interpolations.  Arthur,  supported 
by  their  presence,  was  all  for  letting  Peter  grow  up  a  wild 
untrammelled  child  of  nature.  Oswald  became  genuinely 
distressed. 

"But  education,"  he  protested,  "is  as  natural  to  a  human 
being  as  nests  to  birds." 

"Then  why  force  it?"  said  Phyllis  with  dexterity. 

"Even  a  cat  boxes  its  kittens'  ears!" 

"A  domesticated  cat,"  said  Phoebe.     "A  civilized  cat." 

"But  I've  seen  a  wild  lioness — 

"Are  we  to  learn  how  to  manage  our  young  from  lions  and 
hyenas ! ' '  cried  Phoebe. 

They  were  too  good  for  Oswald.  He  saw  Peter  already 
ruined,  a  fat,  foolish,  undisciplined  cub. 

Dolly  with  sympathetic  amusement  watched  his  distress, 
which  his  living  half  face  betrayed  in  the  oddest  contrast  to 
his  left  hand  calm. 

Arthur  had  been  thinking  gracefully  while  his  sisters 
tackled  their  adversary.  Now  he  decided  to  sum  up  the  dis- 
cussion. His  authoritative  manner  on  these  occasions  was 
always  slightly  irritating  to  Oswald.  Like  so  many  who  read 
only  occasionally  and  take  thought  as  a  special  exercise, 
Arthur  had  a  fixed  persuasion  that  nobody  else  ever  read  or 
thought  at  all.  So  that  he  did  not  so  much  discuss  as 
adjudicate. 

"Of  course,"  he  said,  "we  have  to  be  reasonable  in  these 
things.  For  men  a  certain  artificiality  is  undoubtedly  nat- 
ural. That  is,  so  to  speak,  the  human  paradox.  But  arti- 
ficiality is  the  last  resort.  Instinct  is  our  basis.  For  the 
larger  part  the  boy  has  just  to  grow.  But  We  watch  his 
growth.  Education  is  really  watching — keeping  the  course. 
The  human  error  is  to  do  too  much,  to  distrust  instinct  too 
much,  to  over-teach,  over-legislate,  over-manage,  over- 
decorate " 

"No,  you  don't,  my  gentleman,"  came  the  voice  of  Mary 
from  the  shadow  under  the  old  pear  tree. 

"Now  I  wonder "  said  Arthur,  craning  his  neck  to 

look  over  the  rose  bushes. 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  27 

' '  Diddums  then, ' '  said  Mary.  ' '  Woun  't  they  lettim  put  'tt 
in's  mouf?  Oooh!" 

"Trust  her  instinct, "  said  Dolly,  and  Arthur  was  re- 
strained. 

Oswald  took  advantage  of  the  interruption  to  take  the 
word  from  Arthur. 

'"We  joke  and  sharpen  our  wits  in  this  sort  of  talk,"  he 
said,  "but  education,  you  know,  isn't  a  joke.  It  might  be 
the  greatest  power  in  the  world.  If  I  didn't  think  I  was  a 
sort  of  school-master  in  Africa.  .  .  .  That's  the  only  decent 
excuse  a  white  man  has  for  going  there.  ...  I'm  getting 
to  be  a  fanatic  about  education.  Give  me  the  schools  of  the 
world  and  I  would  make  a  Millennium  in  half  a  century.  .  .  . 
You  don't  mean  to  let  Peter  drift.  You  say  it,  but  you  can't 
mean  it.  Drift  is  waste.  "We  don't  make  half  of  what  we 
could  make  of  our  children.  We  don't  make  a  quarter — not 
a  tenth.  They  could  know  ever  so  much  more,  think  ever  so 
much  better.  We're  all  at  sixes  and  sevens." 

He  realized  he  wasn't  good  at  expressing  his  ideas.  He 
had  intended  something  very  clear  and  compelling,  a  sort  of 
ultimatum  about  Peter. 

"I  believe  in  Sir  Francis  Galton,"  Aunt  Phoebe  remarked 
in  his  pause ;  saying  with  stern  resolution  things  that  she  felt 
had  to  be  said.  They  made  her  a  little  breathless,  and  she 
fixed  her  eye  on  the  view  until  they  were  said.  "Eugenics. 
It  is  a  new  idea.  A  revival.  Plato  had  it.  Men  ought  to 
be  bred  like  horses.  No  marriage  or  any  nonsense  of  that 
kind.  Just  a  simple  scientific  blending  of  points.  Then 
Everything  would  be  different." 

"Almost  too  different,"  Arthur  reflected.  .  .  . 

"When  I  consider  Peter  and  think  of  all  one  could  do  for 

him "  said  Oswald,  still  floundering  for  some  clenching 

way  of  putting  it.  ... 

§  5 

One  evening  Dolly  caught  her  cousin  looking  at  her  hus- 
band with  an  expression  that  stuck  in  her  memory.  It  was 
Oswald's  habit  to  sit  if  he  could  in  such  a  position  that  he 
could  rest  the  obliterated  cheek  of  his  face  upon  a  shadowing 


28  JOAN  AND  PETER 

hand,  his  fingers  on  his  forehead.  Then  one  saw  what  £ 
pleasant-faced  man  he  would  have  been  if  only  he  had  left 
that  Egyptian  shell  alone.  So  he  was  sitting  on  this  occa- 
sion, his  elbow  on  the  arm  of  the  settle.  His  brow  was 
knit,  his  one  eye  keen  and  steady.  He  was  listening  to  his 
host  discoursing  upon  the  many  superiorities  of  the  artisan 
in  the  middle  ages  to  his  successor  of  today.  And  he  seemed 
to  be  weighing  and  estimating  Arthur  with  some  little  diffi- 
culty. 

Then,  as  if  it  was  a  part  of  the  calculation  he  was  making, 
he  turned  to  look  at  Dolly.  Their  eyes  met;  for  a  moment 
he  could  not  mask  himself. 

Then  he  turned  to  Arthur  again  with  his  expression  re- 
stored to  polite  interest. 

It  was  the  most  trivial  of  incidents,  but  it  stayed,  a  mental 
burr. 

§  6 

A  little  accident  which  happened  a  few  weeks  after  Os- 
wald's departure  put  the  idea  of  making  a  will  into  Arthur's 
head.  Dolly  had  wanted  to  ride  a  bicycle,  but  he  had  some 
theory  that  she  would  not  need  to  ride  alone  or  that  it  would 
over-exert  her  to  ride  alone,  and  so  he  had  got  a  tandem 
bicycle  instead,  on  which  they  could  ride  together.  Those 
were  the  days  when  all  England  echoed  to  the  strains  of 

"Disy,  Disy,  tell  me  your  answer  true; 
I'm  arf  crizy 
All  fer  the  love  of  you-oo  .  .  . 

Yew'd  look  sweet 
Upon  the  beat 
Of-a-bicycle-mide-fer-two." 

A  wandering  thrush  of  a  cockney  whistled  it  on  their  first 
expedition.  Dolly  went  out  a  little  resentfully  with  Arthur's 
broad  back  obscuring  most  of  her  landscape,  and  her  third 
ride  ended  in  a  destructive  spill  down  Ipinghanger  Hill. 
The  bicycle  brake  was  still  in  a  primitive  stage  in  those  days ; 
one  steadied  one's  progress  down  a  hill  by  the  art,  since  lost 
to  mankind  again,  of  "back-pedalling,"  and  Dolly's  feet 
were  carried  over  and  thrown  off  the  pedals  and  the  machine 


STUBLANDS  IN  COUNCIL  29 

got  away.  Arthur's  nerve  was  a  good  one.  He  fought  the 
gathering  pace  and  steered  with  skill  down  to  the  very  last 
bend  of  that  dowiiland  descent.  The  last  corner  got  them. 
They  took  the  bank  and  hedge  sideways  and  the  crumpled 
tandem  remained  on  one  side  of  the  bank  and  Arthur  and 
Dolly  found  themselves  torn  and  sprained  but  essentially 
unbroken  in  a  hollow  of  wet  moss  and  marsh-mallows  beyond 
the  hedge. 

The  sense  of  adventure  helped  them  through  an  afternoon 
of  toilsome  return.  .  .  . 

"But  we  might  both  have  been  killed  that  time,"  said 
Arthur  with  a  certain  gusto. 

"If  we  had,"  said  Arthur  presently,  expanding  that  idea, 
"what  would  have  become  of  Peter?"  .  .  . 

They  had  both  made  simple  wills  copied  out  of  Whitaker's 
Almanack,  leaving  everything  to  each  other;  it  had  not  oc- 
curred to  them  before  that  two  young  parents  who  cross 
glaciers  together,  go  cycling  together,  travel  in  the  same 
trains,  cross  the  seas  in  the  same  boats,  might  very  easily 
get  into  the  same  smash.  In  that  case  the  law,  it  appeared, 
presumed  that  the  wife,  being  the  weaker  vessel,  would  ex- 
pire first,  and  so  Uncle  Rigby,  who  had  relapsed  more  and 
more  stuffily  into  evangelical  narrowness  since  his  marriage, 
would  extend  a  dark  protection  over  Peter's  life.  "Lucy 
wouldn't  even  feed  him  properly,"  said  Dolly.  "She's  so 
close  and  childlessly  inhuman.  I  can't  bear  to  think  of  it." 

On  the  other  hand,  if  by  any  chance  Dolly  should  show  a 
flicker  of  life  after  the  extinction  of  Arthur,  Peter  and  all 
his  possessions  would  fall  under  the  hand  of  Dolly's  shady 
brother,  the  failure  of  the  family,  a  being  of  incalculable 
misdemeanours,  a  gross,  white-faced  literary  man,  an  artist 
in  parody  (itself  a  vice),  who  smelt  of  tobacco  always,  and 
already  at  thirty-eight,  it  was  but  too  evident,  preferred  port 
and  old  brandy  to  his  self-respect. 

"We  ought  to  remake  our  wills  and  each  appoint  the  same 
guardian,"  said  Arthur. 

It  was  not  very  easy  to  find  the  perfect  guardian. 

Then  as  Arthur  sat  at  lunch  one  day  the  sunshine  made  a 
glory  of  the  little  silver  tankard  that  adorned  the  Welsh 
dresser  at  the  end  of  the  room. 


30  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Dolly,"  he  said,  ''old  Oswald  would  like  this  job." 

She'd  known  that  by  instinct  from  the  first,  but  she  had 
never  expected  Arthur  to  discover  it. 

"He's  got  a  sort  of  fancy  for  Peter,"  he  said. 

"I  think  we  could  trust  him,"  said  Dolly  temperately. 

"Poor  old  Oswald,"  said  Arthur;  "he's  a  tragic  figure. 
That  mask  of  his  cuts  him  off  from  so  much.  He  idolizes 
you  and  Peter,  Dolly.  You  don't  suspect  it,  but  he  does. 
He's  our  man." 


CHAPTER  THE  THIRD 

ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD? 
§    1 

DESTINY  is  at  times  a  slashing  sculptor.  At  first 
Destiny  seemed  to  have  intended  Oswald  Sydenham 
to  be  a  specimen  of  the  school-boy  hero ;  he  made 
record  scores  in  the  school  matches,  climbed  trees  higher 
than  any  one  else  did,  and  was  moreover  a  good  all-round  boy 
at  his  work ;  he  was  healthy,  very  tall  but  strong,  dark,  pleas- 
ant-looking, and  popular  with  men  and  women  and — he  was 
quite  aware  of  these  facts.  He  shone  with  equal  brightness 
as  a  midshipman ;  he  dared,  he  could  lead.  Several  women 
of  thirty  or  thereabouts  adored  him — before  it  is  good  for 
youth  to  be  adored.  He  had  a  knack  of  success,  he  achieved 
a  number  of  things ;  he  judged  himself  and  found  that  this 
he  had  done  "pretty  decently,"  and  that  "passing  well." 
Then  Destiny  decided  apparently  that  he  was  not  thinking 
as  freshly  or  as  abundantly  as  he  ought  to  do — a  healthy, 
successful  life  does  not  leave  much  time  for  original  think- 
ing— and  smashed  off  the  right  side  of  his  face.  In  a  man- 
ner indeed  quite  creditable  to  him.  It  was  given  to  few  men 
in  those  pacific  days  to  get  the  V.C.  before  the  age  of  twenty- 
one. 

He  lay  in  hospital  for  a  long  spell,  painful  but  self-satis- 
fied. The  nature  of  his  injuries  was  not  yet  clear  to  him. 
Presently  he  would  get  all  right  again.  "V.C.,"  he  whis- 
pered. "At  twenty.  Pretty  decent." 

He  saw  himself  in  the  looking-glass  with  half  his  face 
bandaged,  and  there  was  nothing  very  shocking  in  that. 
Then  one  day  came  his  first  glimpse  of  his  unbandaged 
self.  .  .  . 

' '  One  must  take  it  decently, ' '  he  said  to  himself  again  and 
again  through  a  night  of  bottomless  dismay. 

31 


32  JOAN  AND  PETER 

And,  "How  can  I  look  a  woman  in  the  face  again?" 

He  stuck  to  his  bandages  as  long  as  possible. 

He  learnt  soon  enough  that  some  women  could  not  look 
him  in  the  face  anyhow,  and  among  them  was  one  who 
should  have  hidden  her  inability  from  him  at  any  cost. 

And  he  was  not  only  disfigured;  he  was  crippled  and  un- 
serviceable; so  the  Navy  decided.  Something  had  gone  out 
of  his  eyesight;  he  could  no  longer  jump  safely  nor  hit  a 
ball  with  certainty.  He  could  not  play  tennis  at  all ;  he  had 
ten  minutes  of  humiliation  with  one  of  the  nurses,  protesting 
all  the  time.  ' '  Give  me  another  chance  and  1  '11  begin  to  get 
into  it.  Let  me  get  my  eye  in — my  only  eye  in.  Oh,  the 
devil !  give  a  chap  a  chance !  .  .  .  Sorry,  nurse.  Now !  .  .  . 
Damn!  It's  no  good.  Oh  God!  it's  no  good.  What  shall 
I  do?"  Even  his  walk  had  now  a  little  flavour  of  precau- 
tion. But  he  could  still  shoot  straight  up  to  two  or  three 
hundred  yards.  .  .  .  These  facts  formed  the  basis  for  much 
thinking  on  the  part  of  a  young  man  who  had  taken  it  for 
granted  that  he  was  destined  to  a  bright  and  leading  role  in 
the  world. 

When  first  he  realized  that  he  was  crippled  and  disabled 
for  life,  he  thought  of  suicide.  But  in  an  entirely  detached 
and  theoretical  spirit.  Suicide  had  no  real  attraction  for 
him.  fie  meant  to  live  anyhow.  The  only  question  there- 
fore was  the  question  of  what  he  was  to  do.  He  would  lie 
awake  at  nights  sketching  out  careers  that  did  not  require 
athleticism  or  a  good  presence.  "I  suppose  it's  got  to  be 
chiefly  using  my  brains,"  he  decided.  "The  great  trouble 
will  be  not  to  get  fat  and  stuffy.  I've  never  liked  in- 
doors. ..." 

He  did  his  best  to  ignore  the  fact  that  an  honourable  life 
before  him  meant  a  life  of  celibacy.  But  he  could  not  do  so. 
For  many  reasons  arising  out  of  his  temperament  and  the 
experiences  those  women  friendships  had  thrust  upon  him, 
that  limitation  had  an  effect  of  dismaying  cruelty  upon  his 
mind.  "Perhaps  some  day  I  shall  find  a  blind  girl,"  he 
said,  and  felt  his  face  doubtfully.  "Oh,  damn!"  He  per- 
ceived that  the  sewing  up  of  his  face  was  a  mere  prelude  to 
the  sewing  up  of  his  life.  It  distressed  him  beyond  measure. 
It  was  the  persuasion  that  the  deprivation  was  final  that 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  33 

obsessed  him  with  erotic  imaginations.  For  a  time  he  was 
obsessed  almost  to  the  verge  of  madness. 

He  had  moods  of  raving  anger  on  account  of  this  extrav- 
agant and  uncontrollable  preoccupation.  He  would  indulge 
secretly  in  storms  of  cursing,  torrents  of  foulness  and  foul 
blasphemies  that  left  him  strangely  relieved.  But  he  had  an 
unquenchable  sense  of  the  need  of  a  fight. 

"I'll  get  square  with  this  damned  world  somehow,"  he 
said.  "I  won't  be  beaten." 

There  were  some  ugly  and  dismal  aspects  in  his  attempt 
not  to  be  beaten,  plunges  into  strange  mires  with  remorse  at 
the  far  side.  They  need  not  deflect  our  present  story. 

"What's  the  whole  beastly  game  about  anyhow?"  he 
asked.  ' '  Why  are  we  made  like  this  ? ' ' 

Meanwhile  his  pride  kept  up  a  valiant  front.  No  one 
should  suspect  he  was  not  cheerful.  No  one  should  suspect 
he  felt  himself  to  be  a  thing  apart.  He  hid  his  vicious  strain 
— or  made  a  jest  of  it.  He  developed  a  style  of  humour 
that  turned  largely  on  his  disfigurement.  His  internal 
stresses  reflected  a  dry  bitterness  upon  the  world. 

It  was  a  great  comfort  presently  to  get  hints  that  here  and 
there  other  souls  had  had  to  learn  lessons  as  hard  as  his  own. 
One  day  he  chanced  upon  the  paralyzed  Heine 's  'farewell  to 
beauty.  ' '  Perhaps, ' '  he  said,  "  I  've  only  got  by  a  short  cut 
to  where  a  lot  of  people  must  come  out  sooner  or  later. 
Every  one  who  lives  on  must  get  bald  and  old — anyhow." 
He  took  a  hint  from  an  article  he  found  in  some  monthly 
review  upon  Richard  Crookback.  "A  crippled  body  makes 
a  crippled  mind,"  he  read.  "Is  that  going  to  happen  to 
me?" 

Thence  he  got  to:  "If  I  think  about  myself  now,"  he 
asked,  "what  else  can  happen?  I'll  go  bitter." 

"Something  I  can  do  well,  but  something  in  which  I  can 
forget  myself."  That,  he  realized,  was  his  recipe. 

' '  Let 's  find  out  what  the  whole  beastly  game  is  about, ' '  he 
decided — a  large  proposition.  "And  stop  thinking  of  my 
personal  set-back  altogether." 

But  that  is  easier  said  than  done. 


34  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  2 

He  would,  he  decided,  "go  in  for  science." 

He  had  read  about  science  in  the  magazines,  and  about  its 
remorseless  way  with  things.  Science  had  always  had  a 
temperamental  call  upon  his  mind.  The  idea  of  a  pitiless 
acceptance  of  fact  had  now  a  greater  fascination  than  ever 
for  him.  Art  was  always  getting  sentimental  and  sensuous 
— this  was  in  the  early  'eighties;  religion  was  mystical  and 
puritanical;  science  just  looked  at  facts  squarely,  and  would 
see  a  cancer  or  a  liver  fluke  or  a  healing  scar  as  beautiful  as 
Venus.  Moreover  it  told  you  coldly  and  correctly  of  the  skin 
glands  of  Venus.  It  neither  stimulated  nor  condemned.  It 
would  steady  the  mind.  He  had  an  income  of  four  hundred 
a  year,  and  fairly  good  expectations  of  another  twelve  hun- 
dred. There  was  nothing  to  prevent  him  going  in  altogether 
for  scientific  work. 

Those  were  the  great  days  when  Huxley  lectured  on 
zoology  at  South  Kensington,  and  to  him  Oswald  went.  Os- 
wald did  indeed  find  science  consoling  and  inspiring.  Scien- 
tific studies  were  at  once  rarer  and  more  touched  by  enthusi- 
asm a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  than  they  are  now,  and  he 
was  soon  a  passionate  naturalist,  consumed  by  the  insatiable 
craving  to  know  how.  That  little,  long  upper  laboratory  in 
the  Normal  School  of  Science,  as  the  place  was  then  called, 
with  the  preparations  and  diagrams  along  one  side,  the  sinks 
and  windows  along  the  other,  the  row  of  small  tables  down 
the  windows,  and  the  ever-present  vague  mixed  smell  of 
methylated  spirit,  Canada  balsam,  and  a  sweetish  decay, 
opened  vast  new  horizons  to  him.  To  the  world  of  the  eight- 
een-eighties  the  story  of  life,  of  the  origin  and  branching  out 
of  species,  of  the  making  of  continents,  was  still  the  most 
inspiring  of  new  romances.  Comparative  anatomy  in  par- 
ticular was  then  a  great  and  philosophical  "new  learning," 
a  mighty  training  of  the  mind;  the  drift  of  biological  teach- 
ing towards  specialization  was  still  to  come. 

For  a  time  Oswald  thought  of  giving  his  life  to  biology. 
But  biology  unhappily  had  little  need  of  Oswald.  He  was  a 
clumsy  dissector  because  of  his  injury,  and  unhandy  at  most 
of  the  practical  work,  he  had  to  work  with  his  head  on  one 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  35 

side  and  rather  close  to  what  he  was  doing,  but  it  dawned 
upon  him  one  day  as  a  remarkable  discovery  that  neither 
personal  beauty  nor  great  agility  are  demanded  from  an  ex- 
plorer or  collector.  It  was  a  picture  he  saw  in  an  illustrated 
paper  of  H.  M.  Stanley  traversing  an  African  forest  in  a 
litter,  with  a  great  retinue  of  porters,  that  first  put  this 
precious  idea  into  his  head.  "One  wants  pluck  and  a  cer- 
tain toughness,"  he  said.  "I'm  tough  enough.  And  then  I 
shall  be  out  of  reach  of — Piccadilly." 

He  had  excellent  reasons  for  disliking  the  West  End.  It 
lured  him,  it  exasperated  him,  it  demoralized  him  and  made 
him  ashamed.  He  got  and  read  every  book  of  African  travel 
he  could  hear  of.  In  1885  he  snatched  at  an  opportunity 
and  went  with  an  expedition  through  Portuguese  East 
Africa  to  Nyasa  and  Tanganyika.  He  found  fatigue  and  ill- 
ness and  hardship  there — and  peace  of  nerve  and  imagina- 
tion. He  remained  in  that  region  of  Africa  for  three  years. 

But  biology  and  Africa  were  merely  the  fields  of  human 
interest  in  which  Oswald's  mind  was  most  active  in  those 
days.  Such  inquiries  were  only  a  part  of  his  valiant  all- 
round  struggle  to  reconstruct  the  life  that  it  had  become  im- 
possible to  carry  on  as  a  drama  of  the  noble  and  picturesque 
loves  and  adventures  of  Oswald  Sydenham.  His  questions 
led  him  into  philosophy;  he  tried  over  religion,  which  had 
hitherto  in  his  romantic  phase  simply  furnished  suitable 
church  scenery  for  meetings  and  repentances.  He  read 
many  books,  listened  to  preachers,  hunted  out  any  teacher 
who  seemed  to  promise  help  in  the  mending  of  his  life,  con- 
sidered this  "movement"  and  that  "question."  His  re- 
solve to  find  what  ' '  the  whole  beastly  game  was  about, ' '  was 
no  passing  ejaculation.  He  followed  the  trend  of  his  time 
towards  a  religious  scepticism  and  an  entire  neglect  of  cur- 
rent politics.  Religion  was  then  at  the  nadir  of  formalism; 
current  politics  was  an  outwardly  idiotic,  inwardly  dis- 
honest, party  duel  between  the  followers  of  Gladstone  and 
Disraeli.  Social  and  economic  questions  he  was  inclined  to 
leave  to  the  professors.  Those  were  the  early  days  of  social- 
ist thought  in  England,  the  days  before  Fabianism,  and  he 
did  not  take  to  the  new  teachings  very  kindly.  He  was  a 
moderate  man  in  sesthetic  matters,  William  Morris  left  him 


36  JOAN  AND  PETER 

tepid,  he  had  no  sense  of  grievance  against  machinery  and 
aniline  dyes,  he  did  not  grasp  the  workers'  demand  because 
it  was  outside  his  traditions  and  experiences.  Science 
seemed  to  him  more  and  more  plainly  to  be  the  big  regenera- 
tive thing  in  human  life,  and  the  mission  immediately  before 
men  of  energy  was  the  spreading  of  civilization,  that  is  to 
say  of  knowledge,  apparatus,  clear  thought,  and  release  from 
instinct  and  superstition,  about  the  world. 

In  those  days  science  was  at  its  maximum  of  aggressive 
hopefulness.  With  the  idea  of  scientific  progress  there  was 
also  bound  up  in  many  British  minds  the  idea  of  a  racial 
mission.  The  long  Napoleonic  wars  had  cut  off  British 
thought  from  the  thought  of  the  continent  of  Europe,  and 
this  separation  was  never  completely  healed  throughout  the 
nineteenth  century.  In  spite  of  their  world-empire  the  Brit- 
ish remained  remarkably  self-centred  and  self-satisfied. 
They  were  a  world-people,  and  no  other  people  were.  They 
were  at  once  insular  and  world-wide.  During  the  nineteenth 
century  until  its  last  quarter  there  was  no  real  challenge  to 
their  extra-European  ascendancy.  A  man  like  Sydenham 
did  not  so  much  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  subjugation 
and  civilization  of  the  world  by  science  and  the  Anglican  cul- 
ture was  the  mission  of  the  British  Empire,  as  find  that  con- 
clusion ready-made  by  tradition  and  circumstances  in  his 
mind.  He  did  not  even  trouble  to  express  it;  it  seemed  to 
him  self-evident.  When  Kipling  wrote  of  the  White  Man's 
Burthen,  Briton  was  understood.  Everywhere  the  British 
went  about  the  world,  working  often  very  disinterestedly 
and  ably,  quite  unaware  of  the  amazement  and  exasperation 
created  in  French  and  German  and  American  minds  by  the 
discovery  of  these  tranquil  assumptions. 

So  it  was  with  Oswald  Sydenharn  for  many  years.  For 
three  years  he  was  in  the  district  between  Bangweolo  and 
Lake  Nyasa,  making  his  headquarters  at  Blantyre,  collect- 
ing specimens  and  learning  much  about  mankind  and 
womankind  in  that  chaos  of  Arab  slavers,  Scotch  mission- 
aries, traders,  prospectors,  native  tribes,  Zulu  raiders,  Indian 
store-keepers,  and  black  "Portuguese";  then,  discovering 
that  Blantyre  had  picked  up  a  nick-name  from  the  natives  of 
"Half  Face"  for  him,  he  took  a  temporary  dislike  to  Blan- 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  37 

tyre,  and  decided  to  go  by  way  of  Tanganyika  either  to 
Uganda  or  Zanzibar,  first  sending  home  a  considerable  col- 
lection of  specimens  by  way  of  Mozambique.  He  got 
through  at  last  to  Uganda,  after  some  ugly  days  and  hours, 
only  to  learn  of  a  very  good  reason  why  he  should  return  at 
once  to  the  southern  lakes.  He  heard  that  a  new  British 
consul  was  going  up  the  Zambesi  to  Nyasaland  with  a  British 
protectorate  up  his  sleeve,  and  he  became  passionately  anx- 
ious to  secure  a  position  near  the  ear  of  this  official.  There 
were  many  things  the  man  ought  to  know  at  once  that 
neither  traders  nor  mission  men  would  tell  him. 

To  get  any  official  position  it  was  necessary  for  Oswald  to 
return  to  London  and  use  the  influence  of  various  allied 
Sydenhams.  He  winced  at  the  thought  of  coming  back  to 
England  and  meeting  the  eyes  of  people  who  had  known  him 
before  his  disfigurement,  but  the  need  to  have  some  sort  of 
official  recognition  if  he  was  to  explain  himself  properly  in 
Nyasaland  made  it  necessary  that  he  should  come.  That 
was  in  the  summer  of  1889. 

He  went  down  to  visit  his  uncle  at  Long  Downport  while 
the  "influences"  brewed,  and  here  it  was  he  first  met  Dolly. 
He  did  not  know  it,  but  now  his  face  was  no  longer  a  shock 
to  the  observer.  The  injured  side  which  had  been  at  first 
mostly  a  harsh,  reddish  blank  scar  with  a  glass  eye,  had  not 
only  been  baked  and  weatherworn  by  Africa,  but  it  had  in 
some  indefinable  way  been  assimilated  by  the  unmutilated 
half.  It  had  been  taken  up  into  his  individuality;  his  re- 
nascent character  possessed  it  now;  it  had  been  humanized 
and  become  a  part  of  him ;  it  had  acquired  dignity.  Muscles 
and  nerves  had  reconstructed  some  of  their  relations  and 
partially  resumed  abandoned  duties.  If  only  he  had  known 
it,  there  was  nothing  repulsive  about  him  to  Dolly.  Though 
he  was  not  a  pretty  man,  he  had  the  look  of  a  strong  one. 
The  touch  of  imagination  in  her  composition  made  her  see 
behind  this  half  vizor  of  immobilized  countenance  the  young 
hero  who  had  risked  giving  his  life  for  his  fellows;  his  dis- 
figurement did  but  witness  the  price  he  had  paid.  In  those 
days  at  home  in  England  one  forgot  that  most  men  were 
brave.  No  one  had  much  occasion  nor  excuse  for  bravery. 
A  brave  man  seemed  a  wonderful  man. 


38  JOAN  AND  PETER 

He  loved  Dolly  with  a  love  in  which  a  passion  of  gratitude 
was  added  to  the  commoner  ingredients.  Her  smiling  eyes 
restored  his  self-respect.  He  felt  he  was  no  longer  a  horror 
to  women.  But  could  it  be  love  she  felt  for  him  ?  Was  not 
that  to  presume  too  far?  She  gave  him  friendliness.  He 
guessed  she  gave  him  pity.  She  gave  him  the  infinite  reas- 
surance of  her  frank  eyes.  Would  it  not  be  an  ill  return  to 
demand  more  than  these  gracious  gifts? 

The  possibility  of  humiliation — and  of  humiliating  Dolly 
— touched  a  vein  of  abject  cowardice  in  his  composition.  He 
could  not  bring  himself  to  the  test.  He  tried  some  vague 
signalling  that  she  did  not  seem  to  understand.  His  time 
ran  out  and  he  went — awkwardly.  When  he  returned  for  a 
second  time,  he  returned  to  find  that  Arthur's  fine  profile 
had  eclipsed  his  memory. 

§  3 

After  the  visit  that  made  him  a  godfather,  Oswald  did  not 
return  again  to  England  until  his  godson  had  attained  the 
ripe  age  of  four  years.  And  when  Oswald  came  again  he 
had  changed  very  greatly.  He  was  now  almost  completely 
his  new  self;  the  original  good-looking  midshipman,  that 
sunny  "type,"  was  buried  deep  in  a  highly  individualized 
person,  who  had  in  England  something  of  the  effect  of  a 
block  of  seasoned  ship's  timber  among  new-cut  blocks  of 
white  deal.  He  had  been  used  and  tested.  He  had  been 
scarred,  and  survived.  His  obsession  had  lifted.  He  had 
got  himself  well  under  control. 

He  was  now  acquiring  a  considerable  knowledge  of  things 
African,  and  more  particularly  of  those  mysterious  processes 
of  change  and  adventure  that  were  presented  to  the  British 
consciousness  in  those  days  as  "empire  building." 

He  had  seen  this  part  of  Africa  change  dramatically  under 
his  eyes.  When  first  he  had  gone  out  it  was  but  a  dozen 
years  from  the  death  of  Livingstone,  who  had  been  the  first 
white  man  in  this  land.  In  Livingstone's  wake  had  come 
rifles,  missionaries,  and  the  big  game  hunter.  The  people  of 
the  Shire  Highlands  were  now  mostly  under  the  rule  of 
chiefs  who  had  come  into  the  countrv  with  Livingstone  as 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  39 

Basuto  porters,  and  whom  he  had  armed  with  rifles.  The 
town  of  Blantyre  had  been  established  by  Scotch  mission- 
aries to  preserve  Livingstone's  memory  and  his  work. 
Things  had  gone  badly  for  a  time.  A  certain  number  of  lay 
helpers  to  the  Church  of  Scotland  Mission  had  set  up  as 
quasi-independent  sovereigns,  with  powers  of  life  and  death, 
about  their  mission  stations;  many  of  them  had  got  com- 
pletely out  of  hand  and  were  guilty  of  much  extortion  and 
cruelty.  One  of  them,  Fennick,  murdered  a  chief  in  a 
drunken  bout,  got  himself  killed,  and  nearly  provoked  a  na- 
tive war  only  a  year  or  so  before  Oswald's  arrival.  Arab 
adventurers  from  Zanzibar  and  black  Portuguese  from  the 
Zambesi  were  also  pushing  into  this  country.  The  Yao  to 
the  north  and  the  Angoni-Zulus  to  the  south,  tribes  of  a 
highly  militant  spirit,  added  their  quota  to  a  kaleidoscope  of 
murder,  rape,  robbery  and  incalculable  chances,  which  were 
further  complicated  by  the  annexational  propaganda  of  more 
or  less  vaguely  accredited  German,  Belgian,  Portuguese  and 
British  agents. 

Oswald  reached  Tanganyika  in  the  company  of  a  steam- 
boat (in  portable  pieces)  which  had  been  sent  by  the  Scotch 
missionaries  by  way  of  the  Zambesi  and  Lake  Nyasa;  he 
helped  with  its  reconstruction,  and  took  a  considerable 
share  in  fighting  the  Arab  slavers  between  Nyasa  and  Tangan- 
yika. One  of  his  earliest  impressions  of  African  warfare 
was  the  figure  of  a  blistered  and  wounded  negro  standing 
painfully  to  tell  his  story  of  the  fight  from  which  he  had 
escaped.  *You  see,"  the  Scotch  trader  who  was  translating, 
explained,  "he's  saying  they  had  just  spears  and  the  Arabs 
had  guns,  and  they  got  driven  back  on  the  lagoon  into  the 
reeds.  The  reeds  were  dry,  and  the  Arabs  set  them  on  fire. 
That's  how  he's  got  his  arm  and  leg  burns,  he  says.  Nasty 
places.  But  they'll  heal  all  right;  he's  a  vegetarian  and  a 
teetotaller — usually.  Those  reeds  burn  like  thatch,  and  if 
the  poor  devils  ran  out  they  got  stabbed  or  shot,  and  if  they 
went  into  the  water  the  crocodiles  would  be  getting  them. 
I  know  that  end  of  the  lake.  It's  fairly  alive  with  croco- 
diles. A  perfect  bank  holiday  for  the  crocodiles.  Poor 
devils !  Poor  devils ! ' ' 

The  whole  of  Africa,  seen  in  those  days  from  the  view- 


40  JOAN  AND  PETER 

point  of  Blantyre,  was  the  most  desolating  spectacle  of 
human  indiscipline  it  is  possible  to  conceive.  Everywhere 
was  the  adventurer  and  violence  and  cruelty  and  fever,  no- 
where law  and  discipline.  The  mission  men  turned  robbers, 
the  traders  became  drunkards,  the  porters  betrayed  their 
masters.  Mission  intrigued  against  mission,  disobeyed  the 
consuls,  and  got  at  hopeless  loggerheads  with  the  traders  and 
early  planters.  Where  there  is  no  control,  there  is  no  self- 
control.  Thirst  and  lust  racked  every  human  being;  even 
some  of  the  missionaries  deemed  it  better  to  marry  native 
women  than  to  burn.  In  his  own  person  Oswald  played 
microcosm  to  human  society.  He  had  his  falls  and  bitter 
moments,  but  his  faith  in  science  and  civilization,  human 
will  and  self-control,  stumbled  to  its  feet  again.  "We'll 
get  things  straight  here  presently,"  he  said.  Of  himself  as 
of  Nyasaland.  "Never  say  damned  till  you're  dead." 

His  first  return  to  England  not  only  gave  him  a  futile 
dream  of  Dolly  to  keep  him  clean  and  fastidious  in  Africa, 
but  restored  his  waning  belief  in  an  orderly  world.  Seen 
from  that  distant  point,  the  conflicts  in  Africa  fell  into  a 
proper  perspective  as  the  froth  and  confusion  before  the 
launching  of  a  new  and  unprecedented  peace.  Africa  had 
been  a  black  stew  of  lust,  bloodshed  and  disease  since  the  be- 
ginnings of  history.  These  latter  days  were  but  the  last  flare- 
up  of  an  ancient  disorder  before  the  net  of  the  law  and  the 
roads  and  railways,  the  net  of  the  hospitals  and  microscopes 
and  anthropologists^aught  and  tamed  and  studj4|  and  mas- 
tered the  black  continent.  He  got  his  official  reco^ition  and 
went  back  to  join  this  new  British  agent,  Mr.  Harry  John- 
ston, in  Nyasaland  and  see  a  kind  of  order  establish  itself 
and  grow  more  orderly  and  secure,  over  the  human  confu- 
sion round  and  about  the  Shire  Highlands.  He  found  in  his 
chief,  who  presently  became  Commissioner  and  Administrator 
(with  a  uniform  rather  like  an  Admiral's  for  state  occa- 
sions), a  man  after  his  own  heart,  with  the  same  unquench- 
able faith  in  the  new  learning  of  science  and  the  same  belief 
in  the  better  future  that  opened  before  mankind.  The  Com- 
missioner, a  little  animated,  talkative  man  of  tireless  interest 
and  countless  interests,  reciprocated  Oswald's  liking.  In 
Central  Africa  one  is  either  too  busy  or  too  tired  and  ill  to 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  41 

do  much  talking,  but  there  were  one  or  two  evenings  when 
Oswald  was  alone  with  his  chief  and  they  could  exchange 
views.  Johnston  had  a  modern  religious  philosophy  that 
saw  God  chiefly  through  the  valiant  hearts  of  men;  he  made 
Oswald  read  Winwood  Reade  's  Martyrdom  of  Man,  which 
had  become,  so  to  speak,  his  own  theological  point  of  depar- 
ture. It  was  a  book  of  sombre  optimism  productive  of  a 
kind  of  dark  hopefulness — ''provided  we  stick  it" — that 
accorded  well  with  the  midday  twilight  of  the  Congo  forests 
into  which  Oswald  was  presently  sent.  It  marched  with 
much  that  Oswald  had  been  thinking  out  for  himself.  It 
did  not  so  much  tell  him  new  things  as  crystallize  his  own 
thoughts. 

Two  ideas  were  becoming  the  guiding  lights  of  Oswald 
Sydenham's  thought  and  life.  One  was  the  idea  of  self- 
devotion  to  British  Imperial  expansion.  The  British  Em- 
pire was  to  be  the  instrument  of  world  civilization,  the  pro- 
tectress and  vehicle  of  science;  the  critical  examination  of 
Imperialism  in  the  light  of  these  pretensions  had  still  to 
come.  He  had  still  to  discover  that  science  could  be  talked 
in  other  languages  than  English,  and  thought  go  on  behind 
brown  and  yellow  foreheads.  His  second  idea  was  that  the 
civilizing  process  was  essentially  an  educational  process,  a 
training  in  toleration  and  devotion,  the  tempering  of  egotism 
by  wide  ideas.  Thereby  "we  shall  get  things  straighter 
presently.  We  shall  get  them  very  straight  in  the  long 
run."  .  .  . 

Directly  after  Oswald's  second  visit  to  England,  the  one 
in  which  he  became  Peter's  godfather,  a  series  of  campaigns 
against  the  slave-raiding  Arab  chiefs,  who  still  remained 
practically  independent  in  the  Protectorate,  began.  Oswald 
commanded  in  a  very  "near  thing"  in  the  Highlands,  during 
which  he  held  a  small  stockade  against  the  Yao  with  six 
Sikhs  and  a  few  Atonga  for  three  days,  and  was  finally  res- 
cued when  his  ammunition  had  almost  given  out;  and  after 
that  he  was  entrusted  with  a  force  of  over  three  hundred 
men  in  the  expedition  that  ended  in  the  capture  and  hanging 
of  old  Mlozi.  He  fought  in  steamy  heat  and  pouring  rain, 
his  head  aching  and  his  body  shivering,  and  he  ended  his 
campaigning  with  a  first  experience  of  blackwater  fever.  It 


42  JOAN  AND  PETER 

struck  him  as  an  unutterably  beastly  experience,  although, 
the  doctor  assured  him  he  had  been  let  down  lightly.  How- 
ever, this  was  almost  the  end  of  the  clearing-up  fighting  in 
the  Protectorate,  and  Oswald  could  take  things  easily  for  a 
time.  Thereafter  the  work  of  pacification,  road-making, 
and  postal  and  telegraphic  organization  went  on  swiftly  and 
steadily. 

But  these  days  of  peaceful  organization  were  ended  by  a 
disagreeable  emotional  situation.  Oswald  found  himself 
amused  and  attracted  by  a  pretty  woman  he  despised  thor- 
oughly and  disliked  a  good  deal.  She  was  the  wife  of  a 
planter  near  Blantyre.  So  far  from  thinking  him  an  ugly 
and  disfigured  being,  she  made  it  plain  to  him  that  his  ugli- 
ness was  an  unprecedented  excitement  for  her.  Always  im- 
prisoned in  his  mind  was  the  desire  to  have  a  woman  of  his 
very  own ;  at  times  he  envied  even  the  Yao  warriors  their 
black  slave  mistresses;  and  he  was  more  than  half  disposed 
to  snatch  this  craving  creature  in  spite  of  the  lies  and  tricks 
and  an  incessant  chattering  vanity  that  disfigured  her  soul, 
and  end  all  his  work  in  Africa,  to  gratify,  if  only  for  some 
lurid  months,  his  hunger  for  a  human  possession.  The  situa- 
tion took  him  by  surprise  in  a  negligent  phase ;  he  pulled  up 
sharply  when  he  was  already  looking  down  a  slippery  slope 
of  indignity  and  dishonour.  If  he  had  as  yet  done  no  foolish 
things  he  had  thought  and  said  them.  The  memory  of  Dolly 
came  to  him  in  the  night.  He  declared  to  himself,  and  he 
tried  to  declare  it  without  reservation,  that  it  was  better  to 
sit  for  a  time  within  a  yard  of  Dolly's  inaccessible  goodness 
than  paint  a  Protectorate  already  British  enough  to  be  scan- 
dal-loving, with  the  very  brightest  hues  of  passion's  flame- 
colour.  He  ran  away  from  this  woman. 

So  he  came  back — by  no  means  single-mindedly.  There 
were  lapses  indeed  on  the  slow  steamer  journey  to  Egypt 
into  almost  unendurable  torments  of  regret.  Of  which, 
however,  no  traces  appeared  when  he  came  into  the  presence 
of  Dolly  and  his  godson  at  The  Ingle-Nook. 

§  4 

Peter  took  to  Oswald  and  Oswald  took  to  Peter  from  the 
beginning. 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD!  43 

Peter,  by  this  time,  had  Joan  for  a  foster-sister.  And 
also  he  had  Nobby.  Nobby  was  a  beloved  Dutch  doll,  arm- 
less and  legless,  but  adored  and  trusted  as  no  other  doll  has 
ever  been  in  the  whole  history  of  dolls  since  the  world  be- 
gan. He  had  been  Peter's  first  doll.  One  day  when  he  was 
playing  tunes  with  Nobby  on  the  nursery  fender,  one  excep- 
tionally accented  note  splintered  off  a  side  of  Nobby 's  smooth 
but  already  much  obliterated  countenance.  Peter  was  not 
so  much  grieved  as  dismayed,  and  Arthur  was  very  sympa* 
thetic  and  did  his  best  to  put  things  right  with  a  fine  brush 
and  some  black  paint.  But  when  Peter  saw  Oswald  he  met 
him  with  a  cry  of  delight  and  recognition. 

"It's  Nobby!  "he  cried. 

"But  who's  Nobby?"  asked  Oswald. 

"You — Nobby,"  Peter  insisted  with  a  squeak,  and  turned 
about  just  in  time  to  prevent  Arthur  from  hiding  the  fetish 
away.  "Gimme  my  Nobby!"  he  said. 

"Nobby  is  his  private  god,"  Dolly  hastened  to  explain. 
"It  is  his  dearest  possession.  It  is  the  most  beautiful  thing 
in  the  world  to  him.  Every  night  he  must  have  Nobby 
under  his  pillow.  ..." 

Oswald  stood  with  his  wooden  double  in  his  hand  for  a 
moment,  recognized  himself  at  a  glance,  thought  it  over,  and 
smiled  his  grim,  one-sided  smile. 

"  I  'm  Nobby  right  enough, ' '  he  said.  ' '  Big  Nobby,  Peter. 
He  takes  you  off  to  Dreamland.  Some  day  I'll  take  you  to 
the  Mountains  of  the  Moon." 

So  far  Joan,  a  black-headed,  black-eyed  doll,  had  been 
coyly  on  the  edge  of  the  conversation,  a  little  disposed  to 
take  refuge  in  the  skirts  of  Mary.  Now  she  made  a  great 
effort  on  her  own  account.  "Nobby,"  she  screamed;  "big, 
Big  Nobby!"  And,  realizing  she  had  made  a  success,  hid 
her  face. 

"Nobby  to  you,"  said  Oswald.  "Does  that  want  a  god- 
father too?  It's  my  role.  ..." 

§  5 

The  changes  in  the  Stubland  nursery,  though  they  were 
the  most  apparent,  were  certainly  not  the  greatest  in  the 


44  JOAN  AND  PETER 

little  home  that  looked  over  the  Weald.  Arthur  had  been 
unfaithful  to  Dolly — on  principle  it  would  seem.  That  did 
not  reach  Oswald's  perceptions  all  at  once,  though  even  on 
his  first  visit  he  felt  a  difference  between  them. 

The  later  'nineties  were  the  "Sex  Problem"  period  in 
Great  Britain.  Not  that  sex  has  been  anything  else  than  a 
perplexity  in  all  ages,  but  it  was  just  about  this  time  that 
that  unanswerable  "Why  not?" — that  bacterium  of  social 
decay,  spreading  out  from  the  dark  corners  of  unventilated 
religious  dogmas  into  a  moribund  system  of  morals,  reached, 
in  the  case  of  the  children  of  the  serious  middle-classes  of 
Great  Britain,  this  important  field  of  conduct.  The  manner 
of  the  question  and  the  answer  remained  still  serious.  Those 
were  the  days  of  "The  Woman  Who  Did"  and  the  "Key- 
note Series,"  of  adultery  without  fun  and  fornication  for 
conscience'  sake.  Arthur,  with  ample  leisure,  a  high-grade 
bicycle,  the  consciousness  of  the  artistic  temperament  and  a 
gnawing  secret  realization,  which  had  never  left  him  since 
those  early  days  in  Florence,  that  Dolly  did  not  really  con- 
sider him  as  an  important  person  in  the  world 's  affairs,  was 
all  too  receptive  of  the  new  suggestions.  After  some  dis- 
cursive liberal  conversations  with  various  people  he  found 
the  complication  he  sought  in  the  youngest  of  three  plain 
but  passionate  sisters,  who  lived  a  decorative  life  in  a  pretty 
little  modern  cottage  on  the  edge  of  a  wood  beyond  Limps- 
field.  The  new  gale  of  emancipation  sent  a  fire  through  her 
veins.  Her  soul  within  her  was  like  a  flame.  She  wrote 
poetry  with  a  peculiar  wistful  charm,  and  her  decorative 
methods  were  so  similar  to  Arthur's  that  it  seemed  natural 
to  conclude  they  might  be  the  precursors  of  an  entirely  new 
school.  They  put  a  new  interest  and  life  into  each  other's 
work.  It  became  a  sort  of  collaboration.  .  .  . 

The  affair  was  not  all  priggishness  on  Arthur's  part. 
The  woman  was  honestly  in  love;  and  for  most  men  love 
makes  love;  there  is  a  pride  and  fascination  for  them  in  a 
new  love  adventure,  in  the  hesitation,  the  dash,  the  soft 
capture,  the  triumph  and  kindness,  that  can  manage  with 
very  poor  excuses.  And  such  a  beautiful  absence  of  mutual 
criticism  always,  such  a  kindly  accepting  blindness  in  pas- 
sionate eyes ! 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  45 

At  first  Dolly  did  not  realize  how  Arthur  was  rounding 
off  his  life.  She  was  busy  now  with  her  niece,  her  disrepu- 
table elder  brother's  love  child,  as  well  as  Peter;  she  did  not 
miss  Arthur  very  much  during  his  increasing  absences. 
Then  Arthur,  who  wished  to  savour  all  the  aspects  of  the  new 
situation,  revealed  it  to  her  one  August  evening  in  general 
terms  by  a  discourse  upon  polygamy. 

Dolly 's  quick  mind  seized  the  situation  long  before  Arthur 
could  state  it. 

She  did  not  guess  who  her  successful  rival  was.  She  did 
not  know  it  was  the  younger  Miss  Blend,  that  familiar  dark 
squat  figure,  quick  and  almost  crowded  in  speech,  and  with 
a  peculiar  avidity  about  her  manner  and  bearing.  She  as- 
sumed it  must  be  some  person  of  transcendant  and  humiliat- 
ing merit ;  that  much  her  romantic  standards  demanded. 
She  was  also  a  little  disgusted,  as  though  Arthur  had  dis- 
covered himself  to  be  physically  unclean.  Her  immediate 
impulse  was  to  arrest  a  specific  confession. 

"You  forget  instinct,  Arthur  dear,"  she  said,  colouring 
brightly.  "What  you  say  is  perfectly  reasonable,  wonder- 
fully so.  Only — it  would  make  me  feel  sick — I  mean  sick — 
if,  for  example,  I  thought  you " 

She  turned  away  and  looked  at  the  view. 

"Are  you  so  sure  that  is  instinct?  Or  convention?"  he 
asked,  after  a  pause  of  half  comprehension. 

"Instinct — for  certain.  .  .  .  Lovers  are  one.  Whither 
you  go,  /  go — in  the  spirit.  You  can't  go  alone  with  an- 
other woman  while  I — while  I In  those  things.  .  .  . 

Oh,  it's  inconceivable!" 

"That's  a  primitive  point  of  view." 

"Love — lust  for  the  matter  of  that.  .  .  .  They  are  primi- 
tive things, ' '  said  Dolly,  undisguisedly  wretched. 

"There's  reason  in  the  control  of  them." 

' '  Polygamy ! ' '  she  cried  scornfully. 

Arthur  was  immensely  disconcerted. 

He  lit  a  cigarette,  and  his  movements  were  slow  and 
clumsy. 

"Ideas  may  differ,"  he  said  lamely.  .  .  . 

He  did  not  make  his  personal  confession  after  all. 

In   the   middle   of   the   night  Arthur   was   lying   awake 


46  JOAN  AND  PETER 

thinking  with  unusual  violence,  and  for  the  first  time  for  a 
long  while  seeing  a  question  from  a  standpoint  other  than  his 
own.  Also  he  fancied  he  had  heard  a  sound  of  great  signifi- 
cance at  bedtime.  That  uncertain  memory  worried  him 
more  and  more.  He  got  up  now  with  excessive  precautions 
against  noise  and  crept  with  extreme  slowness  and  care  to 
the  little  door  between  his  room  and  Dolly's.  It  was  locked. 

Then  she  had  understood! 

A  solemn,  an  almost  awe-stricken  Arthur  paddled  back 
to  his  own  bed  through  a  pool  of  moonlight  on  the  floor.  A 
pair  of  pallid,  blue-veined  feet  and  bright  pyjama  legs  and 
a  perplexed,  vague  continuation  upward  was  all  the  moon 
could  see. 

§  6 

It  was,  it  seemed  to  Arthur,  a  very  hard,  resolute  and 
unapproachable  Dolly  who  met  him  at  the  breakfast-table 
on  the  brick  terrace  outside  the  little  kitchen  window.  He 
reflected  that  the  ultimate  injury  a  wife  can  do  to  a  husband 
is  ruthless  humiliation,  and  she  was  certainly  making  him 
feel  most  abominably  ashamed  of  himself.  She  had  always, 
he  reflected,  made  him  feel  that  she  didn't  very  greatly  be- 
lieve in  him.  There  was  just  a  touch  of  the  spitfire  in 
Dolly.  .  .  . 

But,  indeed,  within  Dolly  was  a  stormy  cavern  of  dismay 
and  indignation  and  bitter  understanding.  She  had  wept 
a  great  deal  in  the  night  and  thought  interminably;  she 
knew  already  that  there  was  much  more  in  this  thing  than  a 
simple  romantic  issue. 

Her  first  impulses  had  been  quite  in  the  romantic  tradi- 
tion: "Never  again!"  and  "Now  we  part!"  and  "Hence- 
forth we  are  as  strangers ! ' ' 

She  had  already  got  ten  thousand  miles  beyond  that. 

She  did  not  even  know  whether  she  hated  him  or  loved 
him.  She  doubted  if  she  had  ever  known. 

Her  state  of  mind  was  an  extraordinary  patchwork. 
Every  possibility  in  her  being  was  in  a  state  of  intense  ex- 
citement. She  was  swayed  by  a  violently  excited  passion 
for  him  that  was  only  restrained  by  a  still  more  violent  re- 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD!  47 

solve  to  punish  and  prevail  over  him.  He  had  never  seemed 
so  good-looking,  so  pleasant-faced,  so  much  "old  Arthur" — 
or  such  a  fatuous  being.  And  he  was  watching  her,  watch- 
ing her,  watching  her,  obliquely,  furtively,  while  he  pre- 
tended awkwardly  to  be  at  his  ease.  What  a  scared  comic 
thing  Arthur  could  be  !  There  were  moments  when  she  could 
have  screamed  with  laughter  at  his  solicitous  face. 

Meanwhile  some  serviceable  part  of  her  mind  devoted  itself 
to  the  table  needs  of  Joan  and  Peter. 

Peter  was  disposed  to  incite  Joan  to  a  porridge-eating 
race.  You  just  looked  at  Joan  and  began  to  eat  fast  very 
quietly,  and  then  Joan  would  catch  on  and  begin  to  eat 
fast  too.  Her  spoon  would  go  quicker  and  quicker,  and 
make  a  noise — whack,  whack,  whack!  And  as  it  was  neces- 
sary that  she  should  keep  her  wicked  black  eyes  fixed  on 
your  plate  all  the  time  to  see  how  you  were  getting  on, 
she  would  sometimes  get  an  empty  spoon  up,  sometimes  miss 
her  mouth,  sometimes  splash.  But  Mummy  took  a  strong 
hand  that  morning.  There  was  an  argument,  but  Mummy 
was  unusually  firm.  She  turned  breakfast  into  a  drill. 
''Fill  spoon.  'Tendon !  Mouf.  Withdraw  spoon."  Not 
bad  fun,  really,  though  Mummy  looked  much  too  stern  for 
any  liberties.  And  Daddy  wasn't  game  for  a  diversion. 
Wouldn't  look  at  a  little  boy.  .  .  . 

After  breakfast  Arthur  decided  that  he  was  not  going  to 
be  bullied.  He  got  out  his  bicycle  and  announced  in  a  dry, 
off-hand  tone  that  he  was  going  out  for  the  day. 

"So  long,  Guv 'nor,"  said  Dolly,  as  off-handedly,  and  stood 
at  the  door  in  an  expressionless  way  until  he  was  beyond  the 
green  road  gate. 

Then  she  strolled  back  through  the  house  into  the  garden, 
and  stood  for  a  time  considering  the  situation. 

"So  I  am  to  bring  up  two  babies — and  grow  old,  while 
this  goes  on!"  she  whispered. 

She  went  to  clear  the  things  off  the  breakfast-table,  and 
stood  motionless  again. 

"My  God!"  she  said;  "why  wasn't  I  born  a  man?" 

And  that,  or  some  image  that  followed  it,  let  her  thoughts 
out  to  Africa  and  a  sturdy,  teak-complexioned  figure  with  a 
one-sided  face  under  its  big  sun-helmet. 


48  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Why  didn't  I  marry  a  man?"  she  said.  "Why  didn't 
I  get  me  a  mate?" 

§  ? 

These  were  the  primary  factors  of  the  situation  that 
Oswald,  arriving  six  weeks  later,  was  slowly  to  discover  and 
comprehend.  As  he  did  so  he  felt  the  self-imposed  restraints 
of  his  relations  to  Arthur  and  Dolly  slip  from  him.  Arthur 
was  now  abundantly  absent.  Never  before  had  Oswald  and 
Dolly  been  so  much  alone  together.  Peter  and  Joan  in  the 
foreground  were  a  small  restraint  upon  speech  and  under- 
standing. 

But  now  this  story  falls  away  from  romance.  Romance 
requires  that  a  woman  should  love  a  man  or  not  love  a  man ; 
that  she  should  love  one  man  only  and  go  with  the  man  of 
her  choice,  that  no  other  consideration,  unless  it  be  duty  or 
virtue,  should  matter.  But  Dolly  found  with  infinite  dismay 
that  she  was  divided. 

She  loved  certain  things  in  Oswald  and  certain  things  in 
Arthur.  The  romantic  tradition  which  ruled  in  these  mat- 
ters, provided  no  instructions  in  such  a  case.  The  two  men 
were  not  sufficiently  contrasted.  One  was  not  black  enough ; 
the  other  not  white  enough.  Oswald  was  a  strong  man  and 
brave,  but  Arthur,  though  he  lived  a  tame  and  indolent  life, 
seemed  almost  insensible  to  danger.  She  had  never  seen  him 
afraid  or  rattled.  He  was  a  magnificent  rock  climber,  for 
example ;  his  physical  nerve  was  perfect.  Everything  would 
have  been  so  much  simpler  if  he  had  been  a  "soft."  She  was 
sensitive  to  physical  quality.  It  was  good  to  watch  Arthur 
move;  Oswald's  injuries  made  him  clumsy  and  a  little  cau- 
tious in  his  movements.  But  Oswald  was  growing  into  a 
politician;  he  had  already  taken  great  responsibilities  in 
Africa;  he  talked  like  a  prince  and  like  a  lover  about  his 
Atonga  and  his  Sikhs,  and  about  the  whiteclad  kingdom  of 
Uganda  and  about  the  fantastic  gallant  Masai,  who  must  be 
saved  from  extermination.  That  princely  way  of  thinking 
was  the  fine  thing  about  him;  there  he  outshone  Arthur. 
He  was  wonderful  to  her  when  he  talked  of  those  Central 
African  kingdoms  that  were  rotting  into  chaos  under  the 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  49 

influence  of  the  Arab  and  European  invasions,  chaos  from 
which  a  few  honest  Englishmen  might  yet  rescue  a  group  of 
splendid  peoples. 

He  could  be  loyal  all  through ;  it  was  his  nature.  And  he 
loved  her — as  Arthur  had  never  loved  her.  With  a  gleam 
of  fierceness.  As  though  there  was  a  streak  of  anger  in  his 
love. 

"Why  do  you  endure  it?"  he  fretted.  "Why  do  you 
endure  it?" 

But  he  was  irritable,  absurd  about  many  little  things.  He 
could  lose  his  temper  over  games;  particularly  if  Arthur 
played  too. 

Yet  there  was  a  power  about  Oswald.  It  was  a  quality 
that  made  her  fear  him  and  herself.  She  feared  for  the 
freedom  of  her  spirit.  If  ever  she  became  Oswald's  she 
would  become  his  much  more  than  she  had  ever  been  Ar- 
thur's. There  was  something  about  him  that  was  real  and 
commanding,  in  a  sense  in  which  nothing  was  real  about 
Arthur. 

She  had  a  dread,  which  made  her  very  wary,  that  one  day 
Oswald  would  seize  upon  her,  that  he  would  take  her  in  his 
arms  and  kiss  her.  This  possibility  accumulated.  She  had 
a  feeling  that  it  would  be  something  very  dreadful,  painful 
and  enormous ;  that  it  would  be  like  being  branded,  that  there- 
with Arthur  would  be  abolished  for  her.  ...  At  the  thought 
she  realized  that  she  did  not  want  Arthur  to  be  abolished. 
She  had  an  enormous  kindliness  for  Arthur  that  would  have 
been  impossible  without  a  little  streak  of  humorous  superior- 
ity. If  Oswald  threatened  her  with  his  latent  mastery,  Ar- 
thur had  the  appeal  of  much  dependence. 

And  apart  from  Oswald  or  Arthur,  something  else  in  her 
protested,  an  instinct  or  a  deeply-rooted  tradition.  The 
thought  of  a  second  man  was  like  thinking  of  the  dislocation 
of  her  soul.  It  involved  a  nightmare  of  overlapping,  of 
partial  obliteration,  of  contrast  and  replacement,  in  things 
that  she  felt  could  have  no  honour  or  dignity  unless  they  are 
as  simple  and  natural  as  inadvertent  actions.  .  .  . 

The  thing  that  swayed  her  most  towards  Oswald,  oddly 
enough,  was  his  mutilated  face.  That  held  her  back  from 
any  decision  against  him.  "If  I  do  not  go  with  him,"  she 


50  JOAN  AND  PETER 

thought,  "he  will  think  it  is  that."  She  could  not  endure 
that  he  should  be  so  wounded. 

Then,  least  personal  and  selfish  thought  of  all,  was  the 
question  of  Joan  and  Peter.  What  would  happen  to  them? 
In  any  case,  Dolly  knew  they  would  come  to  her.  There 
was  no  bitter  vindictiveness  in  Arthur,  and  he  shirked  every 
responsibility  he  could.  She  could  leave  him  and  go  to 
Uganda  and  return  to  them.  She  knew  there  would  be  no 
attempt  to  deprive  her  of  Peter.  Oswald  would  be  as  good  a 
father  as  Arthur.  The  children  weighed  on  neither  side. 

Dolly's  mind  had  become  discontinuous  as  it  had  never 
been  discontinuous  before.  None  of  these  things  were  in  her 
mind  all  the  time ;  sometimes  one  aspect  was  uppermost  and 
sometimes  another.  Sometimes  she  was  ruled  by  nothing  but 
vindictive  pride  which  urged  her  to  put  herself  on  a  level 
with  Arthur.  At  times  again  her  pride  was  white  and  tight- 
lipped,  exhorting  her  above  all  things  not  to  put  herself  on 
a  level  with  Arthur.  When  Oswald  pressed  her,  her  every 
impulse  was  to  resist;  when  he  was  away  and  she  felt  her 
loneliness — and  his — her  heart  went  out  to  him. 

She  had  given  herself  to  Arthur,  that  seemed  conclusive. 
But  Arthur  had  dishonoured  the  gift.  She  had  a  great 
sense  of  obligation  to  Oswald.  She  had  loved  Oswald  before 
she  had  ever  seen  Arthur ;  years  ago  she  had  given  her  cousin 
the  hope  and  claim  that  burnt  accusingly  in  his  eye  today. 

"Come  with  me,  Dolly,"  he  said.  "Come  with  me. 
Share  my  life.  This  isn't  life  here." 

' '  But  could  I  come  with  you  ? ' ' 

"If  you  dared.  Not  to  Blantyre,  perhaps.  That's — 
respectable.  Church  and  women  and  chatter.  Blantyre 's 
over.  But  there's  Uganda.  Baker  took  a  wife  there.  It's 
still  a.  land  of  wild  romance.  And  I  must  go  soon.  I  must 
get  to  Uganda.  So  much  is  happening.  Muir  says  this  Sou- 
danese trouble  won't  wait.  .  .  .  But  I  hang  on  here,  day 
after  day.  I  can't  leave  you  to  it,  Dolly.  I  can't  endure 
that." 

"You  have  to  leave  me,"  she  said. 

"No.  Come  with  me.  This  soft  grey-green  countryside 
is  no  place  for  you.  I  want  you  in  a  royal  leopard  skin  with 
a  rifle  in  your  hand.  You  are  pale  for  want  of  the  sun. 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  51 

And  while  we  were  out  there  he  could  divorce  you.  He 
would  divorce  you — and  marry  some  other  copper  puncher. 
Some  Craftswoman.  And  stencil  like  hell.  Then  we  could 
marry. ' ' 

He  gripped  her  wrists  across  the  stone  table.  ' '  Dolly,  my 
darling!"  he  said;  "don't  let  me  go  back  alone." 

"But  what  of  Peter  and  Joan?" 

"Leave  them  to  nurses  for  a  year  or  so  and  then  bring 
them  out  to  the  sun.  If  the  boy  stays  here,  he  will  grow 
up — some  sort  of  fiddling  artist.  He  will  punch  copper  and 
play  about  with  book-binding." 

She  struggled  suddenly  to  free  her  wrists,  and  he  gripped 
them  tighter  until  he  saw  that  she  was  looking  towards  the 
house.  At  last  he  realized  that  Arthur  approached. 

"Oh,  damn!"  said  Oswald.  .  .  . 

§  8 

Dolly  cut  this  knot  she  could  not  untie,  and  as  soon  as 
she  had  cut  it  she  began  to  repent. 

Indecision  may  become  an  unendurable  torment.  On  the 
one  hand  that  dark  strong  life  in  the  African  sunblaze  with 
this  man  she  feared  in  spite  of  his  unconcealed  worship, 
called  to  a  long-suppressed  vein  of  courage  in  her  being;  on 
the  other  hand  was  her  sense  of  duty,  her  fastidious  clean- 
ness, this  English  home  with  its  thousand  gentle  associations 
and  Arthur,  Arthur  who  had  suddenly  abandoned  neglect, 
become  attentive,  mutely  apologetic,  but  who  had  said  not  a 
word,  since  he  had  put  himself  out  of  court,  about  Oswald. 

He  had  said  nothing,  but  he  had  become  grave  in  his 
manner.  Once  or  twice  she  had  watched  him  when  he  had 
not  known  she  watched  him,  and  she  had  tried  to  fathom 
what  was  now  in  his  mind.  Did  he  want  her? 

This  and  that  pulled  her. 

One  night  in  the  middle  of  the  night  she  lay  awake,  un- 
able to  sleep,  unable  to  decide.  She  went  to  her  window 
and  pressed  her  forehead  against  the  pane  and  stared  at  the 
garden  in  a  mist  of  moonlight.  "I  must  end  it,"  she  said. 
"I  must  end  it." 

She  went  to  the  door  that  separated  her  room  from  Ar- 


52  JOAN  AND  PETER 

thur  's,  and  unlocked  it  noisily.  She  walked  across  the  room 
and  stood  by  the  window.  Arthur  was  awake  too.  He  leant 
up  upon  his  elbow  and  regarded  her  without  a  word. 

"Arthur,"  she  said,  "am  I  to  go  to  Africa  or  am  I  to  stay 
with  you  ? ' ' 

Arthur  answered  after  a  little  while.  "I  want  you  to 
stay  with  me. ' ' 

"On  my  conditions?" 

' '  I  have  been  a  fool,  Dolly.     It 's  over.  ..." 

They  were  both  trembling,  and  their  voices  were  unsteady. 

"Can  I  believe  you,  Arthur?"  she  asked  weakly.  .  .  . 

He  came  across  the  moonlight  to  her,  and  as  he  spoke  his 
tears  came.  Old,  tender,  well-remembered  phrases  were  on 
his  lips.  ' '  Dolly !  Little  sweet  Dolly, ' '  he  said,  and  took  her 
hungrily  into  his  arms.  .  .  . 

There  remained  nothing  now  of  the  knot  but  to  tell  Oswald 
that  she  had  made  her  irrevocable  decision. 

§  9 

Arthur  was  eloquent  about  their  reconciliation.  What  be- 
came of  her  rival  Dolly  never  learnt,  nor  greatly  cared ;  she 
was  turned  out  of  Arthur's  heart,  it  would  seem,  rather  as 
one  turns  a  superfluous  cat  out  of  doors.  Arthur  alluded  to 
the  emotional  situation  generally  as  ' '  this  mess. "  "  If  I  'd  had 
proper  work  to  do  and  some  outlet  for  my  energy  this  mess 
wouldn't  have  happened,"  he  said.  He  announced  in  phrases 
only  too  obviously  derivative  that  he  must  find  something 
real  to  do.  ' '  Something  that  will  take  me  and  use  me. ' ' 

But  Dolly  was  manifestly  unhappy.  He  decided  that  the 
crisis  had  overtaxed  her.  Oswald  must  have  worried  her 
tremendously.  (lie  thought  it  was  splendid  of  her  that 
she  never  blamed  Oswald.)  The  garden,  the  place,  was  full 
now  of  painful  associations — and  moreover  the  rejected  cat 
was  well  within  the  range  of  a  chance  meeting.  Travel 
among  beautiful  scenery  seemed  the  remedy  indicated. 
Their  income  happened  to  be  a  little  overspent,  but  it  only 
added  to  his  sense  of  rising  to  a  great  emotional  emergency 
that  he  should  have  to  draw  upon  his  capital.  They  started 
upon  a  sort  of  recrudescence  of  their  honeymoon,  beginning 
with  Rome. 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  53 

Aunt  Phyllis  and  Aunt  Phoebe  came  to  mind  the  house 
and  Joan  and  Peter.  Aunt  Phoebe  was  writing  a  little  wise 
poetical  book  about  education,  mostly  out  of  her  inner  con- 
sciousness, and  she  seized  the  opportunity  of  this  experience 
very  gladly.  .  .  . 

Dolly  was  a  thing  of  moods  for  all  that  journey. 

At  times  she  was  extravagantly  hilarious,  she  was  wild,  as 
she  had  never  been  before.  She  would  start  out  to  scamper 
about  a  twilit  town  after  a  long  day's  travel,  so  that  it  was 
hard  for  Arthur  to  keep  pace  with  her  flitting  energy;  she 
would  pretend  to  be  Tarantula-bitten  in  some  chestnut  grove 
and  dance  love  dances  and  flee  like  a  dryad  to  be  pursued  and 
caught.  And  at  other  times  she  sat  white  and  still  as  though 
she  had  a  broken  heart.  Never  did  an  entirely  virtuous  de- 
cision give  a  woman  so  much  heartache.  They  went  up  Ve- 
suvius by  night  on  mules  from  Pompeii,  and  as  they  stood 
on  the  black  edge  of  the  crater,  the  guide  called  her  attention 
to  the  vast  steely  extent  of  the  moonlit  southward  sea. 

She  heard  herself  whisper  "Africa,"  and  wondered  if 
Arthur  too  had  heard. 

And  at  Capri  Arthur  had  a  dispute  with  a  boatman.  The 
boat  was  taken  at  the  Marina  Grande.  The  boatman  pro- 
posed the  tour  of  the  island  and  all  the  grottos,  and  from 
the  Marina  Grande  the  project  seemed  reasonable  enough. 
The  sea,  though  not  glassy  smooth,  was  quite  a  practicable 
sea.  But  a  point  had  to  be  explained  very  carefully.  The 
boatman  put  it  in  slow  and  simple  Italian  with  much  helpful 
gesture.  If  the  wind  rose  to  a  storm  so  that  they  would  have 
to  return  before  completing  this  ' '  giro, ' '  they  would  still  pay 
the  same  fee. 

"Oh  quite,"  s&id  Arthur  carelessly  in  English,  and  the 
bargain  was  made. 

They  worked  round  the  corner  of  the  island,  under  the 
Salto  di  Tiberio,  that  towering  cliff  down  which  the  legend 
says  Tiberius  flung  his  victims,  and  as  soon  as  they  came  out 
from  under  the  lee  of  the  island  Arthur  dscovered  a  cheat. 
The  gathering  wind  beyond  the  shelter  of  the  cliffs  was  cut- 
ting up  the  blue  water  into  a  disorderly  system  of  tumbling 
white-capped  waves.  The  boat  headed  straight  into  a  storm. 
It  lifted  and  fell  and  swayed  and  staggered ;  the  boatman  at 


54  JOAN  AND  PETER 

his  oar  dramatically  exaggerated  his  difficulties.  "He  knew 
of  this,"  said  Arthur  savagely.  "He  thinks  we  shall  want 
to  give  in.  Well,  let 's  see  who  gives  in  first.  Let 's  put  him 
through  his  program  and  see  how  he  likes  it." 

Arthur  had  taken  off  his  hat,  and  clutched  it  to  save  it  from 
the  wind.  He  looked  very  fine  with  his  hair  blowing  back. 
"Buona  aria,"  he  said,  grinning  cheerfully  to  the  boatman. 
"Bellissima!" 

The  boatman  was  understood  to  say  that  the  wind  was 
rising  and  that  it  was  going  to  be  worse  presently. 

' '  Bellissima ! ' '  said  Arthur,  patting  Dolly 's  back. 

The  boatman  was  seized  with  solicitude  for  the  lady. 

Dolly  surveyed  the  great  cliffs  that  towered  overhead  and 
the  frothy  crests  against  which  the  boat  smacked  and  lifted. 
' '  Bellissima, ' '  she  agreed,  smiling  at  the  boatman 's  consterna- 
tion. "Avanti!" 

The  boat  plunged  and  ploughed  its  way  for  a  little  while 
in  silence.  The  boatman  suggested  that  things  were  getting 
dangerous.  Could  the  signora  swim? 

Arthur  assured  him  that  she  could  swim  like  a  fish. 

And  the  capitano  ? 

Arthur  accepted  his  promotion  cheerfully  and  assured  the 
boatman  that  his  swimming  was  only  second  to  Dolly's. 

The  boatman  informed  them  that  he  himself  could  scarcely 
swim  at  all.  He  was  not  properly  a  seafaring  man.  He 
had  come  to  Capri  for  his  health ;  his  lungs  were  weak.  He 
had  been  a  stonemason  at  Alessandria,  but  the  dust  had  been 
bad  for  his  lungs.  He  could  not  swim.  He  could  not  man- 
age a  boat  very  well  in  stormy  weather.  And  he  was  an 
orphan. 

"Io  Orfano!"  cried  Arthur,  greatly  delighted,  and  stab- 
bing himself  with  an  elucidatory  forefinger.  "Io  Orfano 
anche. " 

.  The  boatman  lapsed  into  gloom.  In  a  little  while  they 
had  beaten  round  the  headland  into  view  of  the  Faraglione, 
that  big  outstanding  rock  which  is  pierced  by  a  great  arch, 
upon  the  south-eastern  side  of  the  island.  The  passage 
through  this  Arco  Naturale  was  in  the  boatman's  agreement. 
They  could  see  the  swirl  of  the  waters  now  through  that 
natural  gateway,  rising,  pouring  almost  to  the  top  of  the  arch 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  55 

and  then  swirling  down  to  the  trough  of  the  wave.  The  west 
wind  whipped  the  orphan's  blue-black  curls  about  his  ears. 
He  began  to  cry  off  his  bargain. 

"We  go  through  that  arch,"  said  Arthur,  "or  my  name 
is  not  Stubland." 

The  boatman  argued  his  case.  The  wind  was  rising;  the 
further  they  went  the  more  they  came  into  the  weather. 
He  had  not  the  skill  of  a  man  born  to  the  sea. 

1  'You  made  the  bargain,"  said  Arthur. 

"Let  us  return  while  we  are  still  safe,"  the  boatman 
protested. 

' '  Go  through  the  arch, ' '  said  Arthur.  The  boatman  looked 
at  the  arch,  the  sky,  the  endless  onslaught  of  advancing 
waves  to  seaward  and  Arthur,  and  then  with  a  gesture  of 
despair  turned  the  boat  towards  the  arch. 

"He's  frightened,  Arthur,"  said  Dolly. 

"Serve  him  right.  He  won't  try  this  game  again  in  a 
hurry,"  said  Arthur,  and  then  relenting:  "Go  through  the 
arch  and  we  will  return.  ..." 

The  boatman  baulked  at  the  arch  twice.  It  was  evident 
they  must  go  through  just  behind  the  crest  of  a  wave.  He 
headed  in  just  a  moment  or  so  too  soon,  got  through  on  the 
very  crest,  bent  double  to  save  his  head,  made  a  clumsy  lunge 
with  his  oar  that  struck  the  rock  and  threw  him  sideways. 
Then  they  were  rushing  with  incredible  swiftness  out  of  the 
arch  down  a  blue-green  slope  of  water,  and  the  Faraglione 
rose  again  before  Dolly's  eyes  like  a  thing  relieved  after  a 
moment  of  intense  concentration.  But  suddenly  everything 
was  sideways.  Everything  was  askew.  The  boat  was  half 
overturned  and  the  boatman  was  sitting  unsteadily  on  the 
gunwale,  clutching  at  the  opposite  side  which  was  rising,  ris- 
ing. The  man,  she  realized,  was  going  overboard,  and 
Arthur's  swift  grab  at  him  did  but  complete  the  capsize.  The 
side  of  the  boat  was  below  her  where  the  floor  should  be,  and 
that  gave  way  to  streaming  bubbling  water  into  which  one 
man  plunged  on  the  top  of  the  other.  .  .  . 

Dolly  leapt  clear  of  the  overturned  boat,  went  under  and 
came  up.  .  .  . 

She  tossed  the  wet  hair  from  her  head  and  looked  about 
her.  The  Faraglione  was  already  thirty  yards  or  more  away 


56  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  receding  fast.  The  boat  was  keel  upward  and  rolling 
away  towards  the  cliff.  There  were  no  signs  of  Arthur  or 
the  boatman. 

What  must  she  do?  Just  before  the  accident  she  had 
noted  the  Piccola  Marina  away  to  the  north-west.  That 
would  mean  a  hard  swim  against  the  waves,  but  it  would  be 
the  best  thing  to  do.  It  could  not  be  half  a  mile  away. 
And  Arthur  ?  Arthur  would  look  after  himself.  He  would 
do  that  all  right.  She  would  only  encumber  him  by  swim- 
ming around.  Perhaps  he  would  get  the  man  on  to  the 
boat.  Perhaps  people  had  seen  them  from  the  Piccola  Ma- 
rina. If  so  boats  would  come  out  to  them. 

She  struck  out  shoreward. 

How  light  one's  clothes  made  one  feel!  But  presently 
they  would  drag.  (Never  meet  trouble  half-way.)  It  was 
going  to  be  a  long  swim.  Even  if  there  should  be  no  cur- 
rent. .  .  . 

She  swam.  .  .  . 

Then  she  had  doubts.  Ought  she  to  go  back  and  look 
for  Arthur?  She  could  not  be  much  good  to  him  even  if 
she  found  him.  It  was  her.  first  duty  to  save  herself. 
Peter  was  not  old  enough  to  be  left.  No  one  would  care  for 
Joan  and  him  as  she  could  care  for  them.  It  was  a  long 
enough  swim  without  looking  for  Arthur.  It  was  going  to 
be  a  very  long  swim.  .  .  . 

She  wished  she  could  get  a  glimpse  of  Arthur.  She 
looked  this  way  and  that.  It  would  be  easier  to  swim  side  by 
side.  But  in  this  choppy  sea  he  might  be  quite  close  and 
still  be  hidden.  .  .  .  Best  not  to  bother  about  things — just 
swim. 

For  a  long  time  she  swam  like  a  machine.  .  .  . 

After  a  time  she  began  to  think  of  her  clothes  again. 
The  waves  now  seemed  to  be  trying  to  get  them  off.  She 
was  being  tugged  back  by  her  clothes.  Could  she  get  some 
of  them  offt  Not  in  this  rough  water.  It  would  be  more 
exhausting  than  helpful.  Clothes  ought  to  be  easier  to  get 
off ;  not  so  much  tying  and  pinning.  .  .  . 

The  waves  were  coming  faster  now.  The  wind  must  be 
freshening.  They  were  more  numerous  and  less  regular. 

Splash !     That  last  wave  was  a  trencherous  beast — no ! — 


ARTHUR  OR  OSWALD?  57 

treacherous  beast.  .  .  .  Phew,  ugh!  Salt  in  the  mouth. 
Salt  in  the  eyes.  And  here  was  another,  too  soon!  .  .  .  Oh 
fight! 

It  was  hard  to  see  the  Piccola  Marina.  Wait  for  the  lift 
of  the  next  wave.  .  .  .  She  was  going  too  much  to  the  left, 
ever  so  much  too  much  to  the  left.  .  .  . 

One  must  exert  oneself  for  Peter's  sake. 

What  was  Arthur  doing? 

It  seemed  a  long  time  now  since  she  had  got  into  the  water, 
and  the  shore  was  still  a  long  way  off.  There  was  nobody 
there  at  all  that  she  could  see.  .  .  .  Boats  drawn  high  and 
dry.  Plenty  of  boats.  Extraordinary  people  these  Italians 
— they  let  stonemasons  take  charge  of  boats.  Extortionate 
stonemasons.  .  .  .  She  was  horribly  tired.  Not  in  good 
fettle.  .  .  .  She  looked  at  the  Faraglione  over  her  shoulder. 
It  was  still  disgustingly  near  and  big.  She  had  hardly  swum 
a  third  of  the  way  yet.  Or  else  there  was  a  current.  Better 
not  think  of  currents.  She  had  to  stick  to  it.  Perhaps  it 
was  the  worst  third  of  the  way  she  had  done.  But  what 
infinite  joy  and  relief  it  would  be  just  to  stop  swimming  and 
spread  one 's  arms  and  feet ! 

She  had  to  stick  to  it  for  little  Peter's  sake.  For  little 
Peter's  sake.  Peter  too  young  to  be  left.  .  .  . 

Arthur  ?  Best  not  to  think  about  Arthur  just  yet.  It  had 
been  silly  to  insist  on  the  Arco  Naturale.  .  .  . 

What  a  burthen  and  bother  dress  was  to  a  woman !  What 
a  leaden  burthen !  .  .  . 

She  must  not  think.  She  must  not  think.  She  must  swim 
like  a  machine.  Like  a  machine.  One.  .  .  .  Two.  .  .  . 
One.  .  .  .  Two.  .  .  .  Slow  and  even. 

She  fell  asleep.  For  some  moments  she  was  fast  asleep. 
She  woke  up  with  the  water  rising  over  her  head  and  struck 
out  again. 

There  was  a  sound  of  many  waters  in  her  ears  and  an 
enormous  indolence  in  her  limbs  against  which  she  struggled 
in  vain.  She  did  struggle,  and  the  thought  that  spurred  her 
to  struggle  was  still  the  thought  of  Peter. 

"Peter  is  too  young  to  be  left  yet,"  sang  like  a  refrain 
in  her  head  as  she  roused  herself  for  her  last  fight  with  the 
water.  Peter  was  too  young  to  be  left  yet.  Peter,  her  little 


58  JOAN  AND  PETER 

son.  But  the  salt  blinded  her  now;  she  was  altogether  out 
of  step  with  the  slow  and  resolute  rhythm  of  the  waves. 
They  broke  foaming  upon  her  and  beat  upon  her,  and  pres- 
ently turned  her  about  and  over  like  a  leaf  in  an  eddy. 


CHAPTER  THE  FOURTH 

FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF   THE  UNIVERSE 

§    1 

PETER  could  not  remember  a  time  when  Joan  was  not 
in  his  world,  and  from  the  beginning  it  seemed  to  him 
that  the  chief  fact  was  Mary.  "Nanny,"  you  called 
her,  or  "Mare-wi,"  or  you  simply  howled  and  she  came. 
She  was  omnipresent;  if  she  was  not  visible  then  she  was 
just  round  the  corner,  by  night  or  day.  Other  figures  were 
more  intermittent,  "Daddy,"  a  large,  loud,  exciting,  almost 
terrific  thing;  "Mummy,"  who  was  soft  and  made  gentle 
noises  but  was,  in  comparison  with  Mary,  rather  a  fool  about 
one's  bottle;  "Pussy,"  and  then  the  transitory  smiling  pro- 
pitiatory human  stuff  that  was  difficult  to  remember  and 
name  correctly.  "Aunties,"  "Mannies"  and  suchlike.  But 
also  there  were  inanimate  persons.  There  were  the  brass- 
headed  sentinels  about  one's  cot  and  the  great  brown  round- 
headed  newel  post.  His  name  was  Bungo-Peter;  he  was  a 
king  and  knew  everything,  he  watched  the  stairs,  but  you  did 
not  tell  people  this  because  they  would  not  understand.  Also 
there  was  the  brass-eyed  monster  with  the  triple  belly  who 
was  called  Chester-Drawers;  he  shammed  dead  and  watched 
you,  and  in  the  night  he  creaked  about  the  room.  And  there 
was  Gope  the  stove,  imprisoned  in  the  fender  with  hell  burn- 
ing inside  him,  and  there  was  Nobby.  Nobby  was  the  pro- 
tector of  little  boys  against  Chester-Drawers,  stray  bears,  the 
Thing  on  the  Landing,  spider  scratchings  and  many  such 
discomforts  of  nursery  life.  Of  course  you  could  also  draw 
a  deep  breath  and  yell  for  "Mare-m/'  but  she  was  apt  not 
to  understand  one's  explanation  and  to  scold.  It  was  better 
to  hold  tight  to  Nobby.  And  also  Nobby  was  lovely  and  went 
whack. 

Moreover  if  you  called  "Mare-wn,"  then  when  the  lights 

59 


60  JOAN  AND  PETER 

came  Joan  would  sit  up  in  her  cot  and  stare  sleepily  while 
you  were  being  scolded.  She  would  say  that  she  knew  there 
weren't  such  things.  And  you  would  be  tilled  with  an  inde- 
finable sense  of  foolishness.  Behind  an  impenetrable  veil  of 
darkness  with  an  intervening  floor  space  acrawl  with  bears 
and  "burdlars"  she  could  say  such  things  with  impunity. 
In  the  morning  one  forgot.  Joan  in  the  daytime  was  a  fairly 
amusing  companion,  except  that  she  sometimes  tried  to  touch 
Nobby.  Once  Peter  caught  her  playing  with  Nobby  and 
pretending  that  Nobby  was  a  baby.  One  hand  took  Nobby 
by  the  head,  and  the  other  took  Joan  by  the  hair.  That  was 
the  time  when  Peter  had  his  first  spanking,  but  Joan  was 
careful  not  to  touch  Nobby  again. 

Generally  Joan  was  passable.  Of  course  she  was  an  in- 
trusion and  in  the  way,  but  if  one  wanted  to  march  round 
and  round  shouting  "Tara-ra-ra,  ra-ra,  ra-ra,  Tara  boom  de 
ay,"  banging  something,  a  pan  or  a  drum,  with  Nobby,  she 
could  be  trusted  to  join  in  very  effectively.  She  was  good 
for  noise-marches  always,  and  they  would  not  have  been  any 
fun  without  her.  She  had  the  processional  sense,  and  knew 
that  her  place  was  second.  She  talked  also  in  a  sort  of  way, 
but  it  was  not  necessary  to  listen.  She  could  be  managed. 
If,  for  example,  she  touched  Peter's  bricks  he  yelled  in  a 
soul-destroying  way  and  went  for  her  with  a  brick  in  each 
hand.  She  was  quick  to  take  a  hint  of  that  sort. 

It  was  Arthur's  theory  that  little  children  should  not  be 
solitary.  Mutual  aid  is  the  basis  of  social  life,  and  from 
their  earliest  years  children  must  be  accustomed  to  co-opera- 
tion. They  had  to  be  trained  for  the  co-operative  common- 
wealth as  set  forth  in  the  writings  of  Prince  Kropotkin. 
Mary  thought  differently.  So  Arthur  used  to  go  in  his  beau- 
tiful blue  blouse  and  sit  in  the  sunny  nursery  amidst  the 
toys  and  the  children,  inciting  them  to  premature  co-opera- 
tions. 

' '  Now  Peter  put  a  brick, ' '  he  used  to  say. 

"Now  Joan  put  a  brick." 

"Now  Dadda  put  a  brick." 

Mary  used  to  watch  proceedings  with  a  cynical  and  irri- 
tating expression. 

"Peter's  tower,"  Peter  would  propose. 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE        61 

"Our  tower,"  Arthur  used  to  say. 
'Peter  knock  it  over." 
'No.     No  one  knock  it  over." 
'Peter  put  two  bricks." 
'Very  well." 

' Dadda  not  put  any  more  bricks.     No.     Peter  finish  it." 
'Na-ow!"  from  Joan  in  a  voice  like  a  little  cat.    "Me 
finish  it." 

Arthur  wanted  to  preserve  against  this  original  sin  of  in- 
dividualism. He  got  quite  cross  at  last  imposing  joyful  and 
willing  co-operation  upon  two  highly  resistant  minds. 

Mary's  way  was  altogether  different.  She  greatly  appre- 
ciated the  fact  that  Dolly  and  Arthur  had  had  the  floor  of 
the  nursery  covered  with  cork  carpet,  and  that  Arthur  at 
the  suggestion  of  Aunt  Pho2be  had  got  a  blackboard  and 
chalks  in  order  to  instil  a  free  gesture  in  drawing  from  the 
earliest  years.  With  a  piece  of  chalk  Mary  would  draw  a 
line  across  the  floor  of  the  nursery,  fairly  dividing  the 
warmth  of  the  stove  and  the  light  of  the  window. 

"That's  your  bit,  Peter,"  she  would  say,  "and  that's 
your  bit,  Joan.  Them's  your  share  of  bricks  and  them's 
yours.  Now  don 't  you  think  of  going  outside  your  bit,  either 
of  you,  whatever  you  do.  Nohow.  Nor  touch  so  much  as  a 
brick  that  isn't  yours." 

Whereupon  both  children  would  settle  down  to  play  with 
infinite  contentment. 

Yet  these  individualists  were  not  indifferent  to  each  other. 
If  Joan  wanted  to  draw  on  the  blackboard  with  chalk,  then 
always  Peter  wanted  to  draw  on  the  blackboard  with  chalk 
at  the  same  time,  and  here  again  it  was  necessary  for  Mary 
to  mark  a  boundary  between  them;  and  if  Peter  wanted  to 
build  with  bricks  then  Joan  did  also.  Each  was  uneasy  if 
the  other  was  not  in  sight.  And  they  would  each  do  the 
same  thing  on  different  sides  of  their  chalk  boundary,  with 
a  wary  eye  on  the  other's  proceedings  and  with  an  endless 
stream  of  explanation  of  what  they  were  doing. 

"Peter's  building  a  love-i-lay  house." 

"Joan's  building,  oh! — a  lovelay-er  house.  Wiv  a  cross 
on  it." 

' '  Why  not  build  one  lovely  house  for  both  of  you  ? ' '  said 


62  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Arthur,  still  with  the  Co-operative  Commonwealth  in  mind. 
Neither  child  considered  that  his  proposal  called  for  argu- 
ment. It  went  over  their  heads  and  vanished.  They  con- 
tinued building  individually  as  before,  but  in  silence  lest  Ar- 
thur should  be  tempted  to  intervene  again. 

§  2 

Joan  was  a  dancer  from  the  age  of  three. 

Perhaps  she  got  some  hint  from  Dolly,  there  is  no  telling ; 
but  anyhow  she  frisked  and  capered  rhythmically  by  a  kind 
of  instinct  whenever  Dolly  played  the  piano.  So  Dolly 
showed  her  steps  and  then  more  steps.  Peter  did  not  take 
to  dancing  so  readily  as  Joan  and  his  disposition  was  towards 
burlesque.  Joan  danced  for  the  love  of  dancing,  but  Peter 
was  inventive  and  turned  his  dances  into  expression.  He  in- 
vented the  Fat  Dance,  with  a  pillow  under  his  pinafore,  the 
Thin  Dance,  with  a  concave  stomach  and  a  meagre  expres- 
sion, the  One  Leg  dance  and  the  Bird  Dance,  this  latter  like 
the  birds  about  the  crumbs  in  winter  time.  Also  the  Tipsy 
Dance,  bacchic,  which  Arthur  thought  vulgar  and  discour- 
aged. Dolly  taught  Joan  the  Flower  Dance,  with  a  very  red 
cap  like  a  pistil,  and  white  silk  skirt  petals  upheld  by  her 
arms.  These  she  opened  slowly,  and  at  last  dropped  and 
then  drooped.  This  needed  a  day  of  preparation.  Peter 
produced  his  first  remembered  aesthetic  judgment  on  a  hu- 
man being  on  this  occasion. 

"Pritty  Joan,"  he  said  with  conviction,  as  she  stood 
flushed  and  bright-eyed  after  the  dance,  and  with  that  he 
went  and  kissed  her. 

"He's  beginning  young,"  said  Arthur. 

It  is  what  all  parents  say,  and  it  is  true  of  all  children. 
But  parents  keep  on  saying  it.  ... 

Before  he  was  fully  four  Peter  was  conducting  an  aesthetic 
analysis  of  his  world.  He  liked  some  of  the  tunes  Dolly 
played  and  disapproved  of  others.  He  distributed  "pritty" 
lavishly  but  by  no  means  indiscriminately  over  the  things 
of  the  world.  "Oh  pritty  fo'wers, "  was  the  primordial  form 
of  these  expanding  decisions.  But  he  knew  that  Nobby  was 
not  pretty. 


Arthur  did  his  best  to  encourage  and  assist  these  budding 
appreciations. 

One  evening  there  was  a  beautiful  still  sunset.  The  sun 
went  down,  a  great  flattening  sphere  of  reddening  gold  sink- 
ing into  vast  levels  of  blue  over  the  remoter  hills.  Joan  had 
already  been  carried  off  to  bed,  but  Arthur  seized  upon 
Peter  and  stood  him  in  the  window  seat.  "Look,"  said  Ar- 
thur. Peter  looked  intently,  and  both  his  parents  sat  beside 
him,  watching  his  nice  little  round  head  and  the  downy  edge 
of  his  intent  profile. 

"Look,"  said  Arthur,  "it  goes.  It  goes.  It's  going  .  .  . 
going  .  .  .  going.  ..." 

The  sun  became  a  crescent,  a  red  scimitar,  a  streak  of 
fire. 

"Ah!"  said  Arthur,  "it's  gone." 

Came  an  immense  pause. 

"Do  it  adain,  Dadda,"  said  Peter  with  immense  approval. 
"Doit  adain.  .  .  ." 

§  3 

The  theory  of  Ideals  played  almost  as  important  a  part  in 
the  early  philosophy  of  Peter  as  it  did  in  the  philosophy  of 
Plato.  But  Peter  did  not  call  them  "Ideals,"  he  called 
them  "toys."  Toys  were  the  simplified  essences  of  things, 
pure,  perfect  and  manageable;  Real  Things  were  trouble- 
some, uncontrollable,  over  complicated  and  largely  irrelevant. 
A  Real  Train,  for  example,  was  a  poor,  big,  clumsy,  limited 
thing  that  was  obliged  to  go  to  Red  Hill  or  Croydon  or  Lon- 
don, that  was  full  of  stuffy  unnecessary  strangers,  usually  sit- 
ting firmly  in  the  window  seats,  that  you  could  do  nothing 
satisfactory  with  at  all.  A  Toy  Train  was  your  very  own ; 
it  took  you  wherever  you  wanted,  to  Fairyland  or  Russia  or 
anywhere,  at  whatever  pace  you  chose.  Then  there  was  a 
beautiful  rag  doll  named  "Pleeceman,"  who  had  a  comic,  al- 
most luminous  red  nose,  and  smiled  perpetually;  you  could 
hit  Joan  with  him  and  make  her  squawk  and  yet  be  sure  of 
not  hurting  her  within  the  meaning  of  the  law ;  how  inferior 
was  the  great  formless  lump  of  a  thing,  with  a  pale  unevent- 
ful visitor 's  sort  of  face  we  saw  out  of  the  train  at  Caterham ! 


64  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Nobody  could  have  lifted  him  by  a  leg  and  waved  him  about ; 
and  if  you  had  shied  him  into  a  corner,  instead  of  all  going 
just  anyhow  and  still  smiling,  he  would  probably  have  been 
cross  and  revengeful.  How  inferior  again  was  the  Real 
Cow,  with  its  chewing  habits,  its  threatening  stare  and  inoo 
and  its  essential  rudeness,  to  Suzannah,  the  cow  on  the  green 
board.  Perhaps  the  best  real  things  in  the  world  were  young 
pigs.  .  .  . 

But  this  much  is  simply  to  explain  how  it  was  that  Peter 
was  grateful  but  not  overwhelmed  to  find  that  there  was  also 
a  real  Nobby  in  existence  as  well  as  his  beloved  fetish.  And 
this  Nobby  was,  as  real  things  went,  much  better  than  one 
could  have  expected  him  to  be.  Peter's  heart  went  out  to 
him  from  the  very  first  encounter,  and  never  found  reason  to 
relinquish  him  again. 

Nobby  wasted  a  good  lot  of  time  that  might  have  been 
better  employed  in  play,  by  talking  to  Mummy;  and  when 
a  little  boy  set  himself  to  rescue  his  friend  from  so  tepid  an 
occupation,  Mary  showed  a  peculiar  disposition  to  thwart 
one.  ' '  Oh !  leave  them  alone, ' '  she  said,  with  the  tart  note 
in  her  voice.  "I'm  sure  they  don't  want  either  of  you." 

Still  Mummy  didn't  always  get  Nobby,  and  a  little  boy 
and  girl  could  hear  him  talk  and  play  about  with  him. 
When  he  told  really  truly  things  it  was  better  than  any  one 
else  telling  stories.  He  had  had  all  sorts  of  experiences;  he 
had  been  a  sailor ;  he  knew  what  was  inside  a  ship.  That  had 
been  a  growing  need  in  Peter's  life.  All  Peter's  ships  had 
been  solid  hitherto.  And  Nobby  had  been  in  the  same  field, 
practically  speaking,  with  lions  ever  so  many  times.  Lions, 
of  course,  are  not  nearly  so  dreadful  as  bears  in  a  little  boy 's 
world;  bears  are  the  most  dreadful  things  in  the  world  (es- 
pecially is  this  true  of  the  black,  under-bed  bear,  Ursus 
Pedivorus)  but  lions  are  dreadful  enough.  If  one  saw  one 
in  a  field  one  would  instantly  get  back  over  the  stile  again 
and  go  home,  Mary  or  no  Mary.  But  one  day  near  Nairobi, 
Nobby  had  come  upon  a  lion  in  broad  daylight  right  in  the 
middle  of  the  path.  Nobby  had  nothing  but  a  stick.  ' '  I  was 
in  a  hurry  and  I  felt  annoyed,"  said  Nobby.  "So  I  just 
walked  towards  him  and  waved  my  stick  at  him,  and  shouted 
to  him  to  get  out  of  my  way." 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE        65 

"  Yes  t"  breathless. 

"And  he  went.  Most  lions  will  get  away  from  a  man  if 
they  can.  Not  always  though." 

A  pause.  There  was  evidently  another  story  to  that. 
"Tell  us,"  said  Mummy,  more  interested  even  than  the 
children. 

Big  Nobby  made  model  African  villages  out  of  twigs  and 
such-like  nothings  in  the  garden,  and  he  brought  down  Joan 
and  Peter  boxes  of  Zulu  warriors  from  London  to  inhabit 
them.  Also  he  bought  two  boxes  of  "Egyptian  camel  corps. ' ' 
One  wet  day  he  "made  Africa"  on  the  nursery  floor.  He 
made  mountains  out  of  books  and  wood  blocks,  and  put  a 
gold-mine  of  gold  paper  therein ;  he  got  in  a  lot  of  twigs  of 
box  from  the  garden  and  made  the  most  lovely  forest  you  can 
imagine ;  he  built  villages  of  bricks  for  the  Zulus ;  he  put  out 
the  animals  of  Peter's  Noah's  ark  in  the  woods.  "Here's 
the  lion,"  he  said,  propping  up  the  lion  against  the  tree  be- 
cause of  its  broken  leg. 

"Gurr  Woooooah  !"  said  Joan. 

"Exactly,"    said  Nobby,  encouraging  her. 

"Waar-oooh.     "VVaaaa!"  said  Joan,  presuming  on  it. 

"Bang!"  said  Peter.  "You're  dead,  Joan,"  and  stopped 
any  more  of  that. 


§  ± 

Then  one  day  an  extraordinary  thing  happened.  It  was 
towards  lunch-time,  and  Mary  was  bringing  Joan  and  Peter 
home  from  a  walk  in  the  woods.  Joan  was  tired,  but  Peter 
had  been  enterprising  and  had  run  on  far  ahead;  he  was 
trotting  his  fat  legs  down  the  rusty  lane  that  ran  through 
the  bushes  close  to  the  garden  fence  when  he  saw  Nobby 's 
lank  form  coming  towards  him  from  the  house,  walking 
slowly  and  as  if  he  couldn't  see  where  he  was  going.  Peter 
was  for  slipping  into  the  bushes  and  jumping  out  at  him 
and  saying  ' '  Boo. ' '  Then  he  saw  Nobby  stop  and  stand  still 
and  stare  back  at  the  house,  and  then,  most,  wonderful  and 
dreadful !  this  great  big  grown-up  began  to  sob  and  cry.  He 
said  "Ooo-er!"  just  as  Peter  did  sometimes  when  he  felt  un- 


66  JOAN  AND  PETER 

endurably  ill-used.  And  he  kept  raising  his  clenched  fists 
as  if  he  was  going  to  shake  them — and  not  doing  so. 

"I  will  go  to  Hell,"  said  Nobby.    "1  will  go  to  Hell." 

In  a  passion ! 

(Peter  was  shocked  and  ashamed  for  Nobby.) 

Then  Nobby  turned  and  saw  Peter  before  Peter  could 
hide  away  from  him.  He  stopped  crying  at  once,  but  there 
was  his  funny  face  all  red  and  shiny  on  one  side. 

"Hullo,  old  Peter  boy,"  said  Nobby.  "I'm  off.  I'm  go- 
ing right  away.  Been  fooled." 

So  that  was  it.  But  hadn't  he  Africa  and  lions  and  ele- 
phants and  black  men  to  go  to,  a  great  Real  Play  Nursery  in- 
stead of  a  Nursery  of  Toys?  Why  make  a  fuss  of  it? 

He  came  to  Peter  and  lifted  him  up  in  his  arms.  "Good- 
bye, old  Peter,"  he  said.  "Good-bye,  Peter.  Keep  off  the 
copper  punching."  He  kissed  his  godson — how  wet  his  face 
was ! — and  put  him  down,  and  was  going  off  along  the  path 
and  Peter  hadn't  said  a  word. 

He  wanted  to  cry  too,  to  think  that  Nobby  was  going.  He 
stared  and  then  ran  a  little  way  after  his  friend. 

"Nobby,"  he  shouted;  "good-bye!" 

"Good-bye,  old  man,"  Nobby  cried  back  to  him. 

"Good-bye.     Gooood-bye-er. " 

Then  Peter  trotted  back  to  the  house  to  be  first  with  the 
sad  but  exciting  news  that  Nobby  had  gone.  But  as  he 
came  down  from  the  green  wicket  to  the  house  he  looked  up 
and  saw  his  father  at  the  upstairs  window,  gazing  after 
Nobby  with  an  unusual  expression  that  perplexed  him,  and 
in  the  little  hall  he  found  his  mother,  and  she  had  been  cry- 
ing too,  though  she  was  pretending  she  hadn't.  They  knew 
about  Nobby.  Something  strange  was  in  the  air,  perceptible 
to  a  little  boy  but  utterly  beyond  his  understanding.  Per- 
haps Nobby  had  been  naughty.  So  he  thought  it  best  to 
change  the  subject,  and  began  talking  at  once  about  a  won- 
derful long  bicycle  with  no  less  than  three  men  on  it — not 
two,  Mummy,  but  three — that  he  had  seen  upon  the  highroad. 
They  had  thin  white  silk  shirts  without  sleeves,  and  rode 
furiously  with  their  heads  down.  Their  shirts  were  blown 
out  funnily  behind  them  in  the  middles  of  their  backs.  They 
went  like  that!  . 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE        67 

All  through  the  midday  meal  nobody  said  a  word  about 
Nobby.  .  .  . 

Nobody  ever  did  say  anything  about  Nobby  again.  When 
on  a  few  occasions  Peter  himself  talked  appreciatively  of 
Nobby  nobody,  unless  it  was  Joan  now  and  then,  seemed  the 
least  bit  interested.  .  .  . 

One  side  consequence  of  Oswald's  visit  had  been  the  de- 
thronement of  the  original  Nobby.  The  real  Nobby  had 
somehow  thrust  the  toy  Nobby  into  the  background.  Per- 
haps he  drifted  into  the  recesses  of  some  box  or  cupboard. 
At  any  rate  when  Peter  thought  of  him  one  day  he  was  no- 
where to  be  found.  That  did  not  matter  so  much  as  it  would 
have  done  a  couple  of  months  before.  Now  if  the  bears  and 
"burdlars"  got  busy  in  the  night-nursery  Peter  used  to  pre- 
tend that  the  pillow  was  the  real  Nobby,  the  Nobby  who 
wasn't  even  afraid  of  lions  and  had  driven  off  one  with  a 
stick.  A  prowling  bear  hadn't  much  chance  against  a  little 
boy  who  snuggled  up  to  that  Nobby. 

§  5 

Mummy  was  rather  dull  in  those  days,  and  Daddy  seemed 
always  to  be  looking  at  her.  Daddy  had  a  sort  of  inelasticity 
in  his  manner  too.  Suddenly  Aunt  Phyllis  and  Aunt  Phoebe 
appeared,  and  it  was  announced  that  Daddy  and  Mummy 
were  going  off  to  Italy.  It  was  too  far  for  them  to  take  little 
boys  and  girls,  they  said,  and  besides  there  were,  oh !  horrid 
spiders.  And  Peter  must  stay  to  mind  the  house  and  Joan 
and  his  aunts;  it  wasn't  right  not  to  have  some  man  about. 
He  was  to  have  a  sailor  suit  with  trousers  also,  great  re- 
sponsibilities altogether  for  a  boy  not  much  over  four.  So 
there  was  a  great  kissing  and  going  off,  and  Joan  and  Peter 
settled  down  to  the  rule  of  the  aunts  and  only  missed  Mummy 
and  Daddy  now  and  then. 

Then  one  day  something  happened  over  the  children's 
heads.  Mary  had  red  eyes  and  wouldn't  say  why;  the  aunts 
had  told  her  not  to  do  so. 

Phyllis  and  Phoebe  decided  not  to  darken  the  children's 
lives  by  wearing  mourning,  but  Mary  said  that  anyhow  she 
would  go  into  black.  But  neither  Joan  nor  Peter  took  much 
notice  of  the  black  dress. 


68  JOAN  AND  PETER 

''Why  don't  Mummy  and  Daddy  come  back?"  asked  Peter 
one  day  of  Aunt  Phoebe. 

"They've  travelled  to  such  wonderful  places,"  said  Aunt 
Phoebe  with  a  catch  in  her  voice.  "They  may  not  be  back 
for  ever  so  long.  No.  Not  till  Peter  is  ever  so  big. ' ' 

"Then  why  don't  they  send  us  cull'd  poce-cards  like  they 
did't  first?"  said  Peter. 

Aunt  Phoebe  was  so  taken  aback  she  could  answer  nothing. 

"They  just  forgotten  us,"  said  Peter  and  reflected. 
"They  gone  on  and  on." 

"Isn't  Nobby  ever  coming  back  either?"  he  asked,  ab- 
ruptly, displaying  a  devastating  acceptance  of  the  new  situ- 
ation. 

"But  who's  Nobby?" 

"That's  Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham,"  said  Mary. 

' '  He 's  coming  back  quite  soon, ' '  said  Aunt  Phcebe.  ' '  He 's 
on  his  way  now." 

"  'Cos  he  promised  me  a  lion  skin,"  said  Peter. 

§  6 

Aunts  Phyllis  and  Phoebe  found  themselves  two  of  the 
four  guardians  appointed  under  Arthur's  will. 

It  had  been  one  of  Arthur's  occasional  lapses  into  deceit 
that  he  destroyed  the  will  which  made  Oswald  the  sole 
guardian  of  Joan — so  far  as  he  could  dispose  of  Joan — and 
Peter,  without  saying  a  word  about  it  to  Dolly.  He  had 
vacillated  between  various  substitutes  for  Oswald  up  to  the 
very  moment  when  he  named  the  four  upon  whom  he  decided 
finally,  to  his  solicitor.  Some  streak  of  jealousy  or  pride, 
combined  with  a  doubt  whether  Oswald  would  now  consent 
to  act,  had  first  prompted  the  alteration.  Instead  he  had 
decided  to  shift  the  responsibility  to  his  sisters.  Then  a 
twinge  of  compunction  had  made  him  replace  Oswald.  Then 
feeling  that  Oswald  might  still  be  out  talked  or  out  voted 
by  his  sisters,  he  had  stuck  in  the  name  of  Dolly's  wealthy 
and  important  cousin,  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham.  He  had 
only  seen  her  twice,  but  she  had  seemed  a  lady  of  consider- 
able importance  and  strength  of  character.  Anyhow  it  made 
things  fairer  to  the  Sydenham  side. 

But  Phyllis   and  Phcebe  at  once  assumed,   not   without 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE        69 

secret  gladness,  that  the  burthen  of  this  responsibility  would 
fall  upon  them.  Oswald  Sydenham  was  away  in  the  heart 
of  Africa;  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  was  also  abroad.  She 
had  telegraphed,  "Unwell  impossible  to  return  to  England 
six  weeks  continue  children's  life  as  hitherto."  That  seemed 
to  promise  a  second  sleeping  partner  in  the  business. 

The  sisters  decided  to  continue  The  Ingle-Nook  as  the 
children's  home,  and  made  the  necessary  arrangements  with 
Mr.  Sycamore,  the  family  solicitor,  to  that  end. 

They  discussed  their  charges  very  carefully  and  fully. 
Phyllis  was  for  a  meticulous  observance  of  Arthur's  known 
or  assumed  "wishes,"  but  Pho?be  took  a  broader  view.  Mary 
too  pointed  out  the  dangers  of  too  literal  an  adhesion  to 
precedent. 

' '  We  want  everything  to  go  on  exactly  as  it  did  when  they 
were  alive,"  said  Phyllis  to  Mary. 

"Things  'ave  got  to  be  different,"  said  Mary. 

"Not  if  we  can  help  it,"  said  Aunt  Phyllis. 

"They'll  grow,"  said  Mary  after  reflection. 

Phffibe  became  eloquent  in  the  evening. 

"We  are  to  have  the  advantages  of  maternity,  Phyllis, 
without — without  the  degradation.  It  is  a  solemn  trust. 
Blessed  are  we  among  women,  Phyllis.  I  feel  a  Madonna. 
"We  are  Madonnas,  Phyllis.  Modern  Madonnas.  Just 
Touched  by  the  Wings  of  the  Dove.  .  .  .  These  little  souls 
dropped  from  heaven  upon  our  knees.  .  .  .  Poor  Arthur! 
It  is  our  task  to  guide  his  offspring  to  that  high  destiny  he 
might  have  attained.  Look,  Phyllis ! ' ' 

With  her  flat  hand  she  indicated  the  long  garden  path 
that  Dolly  had  planned. 

Phyllis  peered  forward  without  intelligence.  "What  is 
it?"  she  asked. 

Phyllis  perceived  that  Phcebe  was  flushed  with  poetical 
excitement.  And  Phrebe's  voice  dropped  mystically  to  a 
deep  whisper.  "Don't  you  see?  White  lilies!  A  coinci- 
dence, of  course.  But — Beautiful." 

"For  a  child  with  a  high  destiny,  I  doubt  if  Peter  is  care- 
ful enough  with  his  clothes,"  said  Phyllis,  trying  to  sound  a 
less  Pre-Raphaelite  note.  "He  was  a  perfect  little  Dis- 
grace this  afternoon." 


70  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"The  darling!  But  I  understand.  .  .  .  Joan  too  has 
much  before  her,  Phyllis.  As  yet  their  minds  are  blank, 
tabula  rasa;  of  either  of  them  there  is  still  to  be  made — any- 
thing. Peter — upon  this  Rock  I  set — a  New  Age.  When 
women  shall  come  to  their  own.  Joan  again.  Joan  of  Arc. 
Coincidences  no  doubt.  But  leave  me  my  fancies.  Fancies 
— if  you  will.  For  me  they  are  no  fancies.  Before  the 
worlds,  Phyllis,  we  were  made  for  this." 

She  rested  her  chin  on  her  hand,  and  stared  out  into  the 
blue  twilight,  a  brooding  prophetess. 

"Only  a  woman  can  understand  a  woman,"  she  said  pres- 
ently. "Not  a  Word  of  this,  Phyllis,  to  Others." 

"I  wish  we  had  bought  some  cigarettes  this  afternoon," 
said  Phyllis. 

"The  little  red  glow,"  reflected  Phoebe  indulgently.  "It 
helps.  But  I  don't  want  to  smoke  tonight.  It  would  spoil 
it.  Smoke !  Let  the  Flame  burn  clear  awhile.  .  .  .  We  will 
get  in  cigarettes  tomorrow." 

§  7 

Joan  and  Peter  remained  unaware  of  the  great  destinies 
before  them.  More  observant  persons  than  they  were  might 
have  guessed  there  were  deep  meanings  in  the  way  in  which 
Aunt  Phoebe  smoothed  back  their  hair  from  their  foreheads 
and  said  "Ah,"  and  bade  them  "Mark  it  well"  whenever 
she  imparted  any  general  statement,  but  they  took  these 
things  merely  as  her  particular  way  of  manifesting  the  irra- 
tional quality  common  to  all  grown-up  people.  Also  she 
would  say  ' '  Dignity !  Your  mission ! ' '  when  they  howled  or 
fought.  It  was  to  the  manuscript  that  grew  into  a  bigger 
and  bigger  pile  upon  what  had  been  Arthur's  writing-desk 
in  Arthur's  workroom,  that  she  restricted  her  most  stirring 
ideas.  She  wrote  there  daily,  going  singing  to  it  as  healthy 
young  men  go  singing  to  their  bathrooms.  She  splashed  her 
mind  about  and  refreshed  herself  greatly.  She  wrote  in  a 
large  hand,  punctuating  chiefly  with  dashes.  She  had  con- 
ceived her  book  rather  in  the  manner  of  the  prophetic  works 
of  the  admired  Mr.  Ruskin — with  Carlylean  lapses.  It  was 
to  be  called  Hail  Bambino  and  the  Grain  of  Mustard  Seed. 
It  was  all  about  the  tremendousness  of  children. 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE         71 

The  conscientious  valiance  of  Aunt  Phoebe  was  very  mani- 
fest in  the  opening.  "Cgesar,"  the  book  began,  "and  the 
son  of  Semele  burst  strangely  into  this  world,  but  Jesus, 
Mohammed,  Confucius,  Newton,  Darwin,  Robert  Burns,  were 
born  as  peacefully  as  you  or  I.  Nathless  they  came  for  such 
ends — if  indeed  one  can  think  of  any  ending  thereto ! — as 
blot  out  the  stars.  Yesterday  a  puling  babe — for  Jesus 
puled,  Mohammed  puled,  let  us  not  spare  ourselves,  Newton, 
a  delicate  child,  puled  most  offensively — Herod  here  and 
bacteria  there,  infantile  colic,  tuberculosis  and  what  not, 
searched  for  each  little  life,  in  vain,  and  so  to-day  behold 
springing  victoriously  from  each  vital  granule  a  tree  of 
Teaching,  of  Consequence,  that  buds  and  burgeons  and 
shoots  and  for  ever  spreads  so  that  the  Gates  of  Hell  may 
not  prevail  against  it!  Here  it  is  the  Tree  of  Spirituality, 
here  the  Tree  of  Thought,  predestined  intertwiner  with  the 
Tree  of  Asgard,  here  in  our  last  instance  a  chanting  Beauty, 
a  heartening  lyrical  Yawp  and  Whirlaboo.  And  forget  it 
not,  whatever  else  be  forgotten,  the  Word  of  the  Wise,  'as 
the  twig  is  ~bent  the  tree  inclines.'  So  it  is  and  utterly  that 
we  realize  the  importance  of  education,  the  pregnant  inten- 
sity of  the  least  urgency,  the  hint,  the  gleam,  the  offering 
of  service,  to  these  First  Tender  Years." 

Here  Aunt  Phoebe  had  drawn  breath  for  a  moment,  be- 
fore she  embarked  upon  her  second  paragraph ;  and  here  we 
will  leave  Aunt  Phoebe  glowing  amidst  her  empurpled  prose. 

Joan  and  Peter  took  the  substitution  of  Aunt  Phoebe  mut- 
tering like  a  Sibyl  overhead  and  Aunt  Phyllis,  who  was 
really  amusing  with  odd  drawings  and  twisted  paper  toys 
and  much  dancing  and  running  about,  in  the  place  of  Daddy 
and  Mummy,  with  the  stoical  acceptance  of  the  very  young. 
About  Daddy  and  Mummy  there  hung  a  faint  flavour  of 
departure  but  no  sense  of  conclusive  loss.  No  clear  image 
and  expectation  of  a  return  had  been  formed.  No  day  of 
definite  disappointment  ever  came.  After  all  the  essential 
habitual  person,  Mary,  was  still  there,  and  all  the  little  im- 
portant routines  of  child-life  continued  very  much  as  they 
had  always  done. 

Yet  there  was  already  the  dawn  of  further  apprehensions 
in  Peter's  mind  at  least.  One  day  Peter  picked  up  a  dead 


72  JOAN  AND  PETER 

bird  in  the  garden,  a  bird  dead  with  no  injuries  manifest. 
He  tried  to  make  it  stand  up  and  peck. 

"It  ain't  no  good,  Master  Peter;  it's  dead,"  said  Mary. 

"What's  dead?"  said  Peter. 

"That  is." 

"Gone  dead,"  said  Peter. 

"And  won't  ever  go  anything  else  now — except  smell," 
said  Mary. 

Peter  reflected.  Later  he  re-visited  the  dead  bird  and 
was  seen  in  profound  meditation  over  it.  Then  he  re- 
paired to  Aunt  Phyllis  and  confided  his  intention  of  immor- 
tality. 

"Peter,"  he  said,  "not  go  dead — nohow." 

"Of  course  not,"  said  Aunt  Phyllis.  "He's  got  too  much 
sense.  The  idea!" 

This  was  reassuring.     But  alone  it  was  not  enough. 

"Joan  not  go  dead,"  he  said.     "No." 

"Certainly  she  shan't,"  said  Aunt  Pirellis  and  awaited 
further  decisions. 

"Pussy  not  go  dead." 

"Not  until  ninety  times  nine." 

"Aunt  Phyllis  not  go  dead.     Marewi  not  go  dead." 

He  reflected  further.  He  tried,  "Mummy  and  Daddy  not 
go  dead.  ..." 

Then  after  thought,  "When  are  Daddy  and  Mummy  com- 
ing back  again?" 

Aunt  Phyllis  told  a  wise  lie.  "Some  day.  Not  for  a 
long  time.  They've  gone — oh,  ever  so  far." 

"Farther  than  ever  so,"  said  Peter. 

He  reflected.  "When  they  come  back  Peter  will  be  a  Big 
Boy.  Mummy  and  Daddy  'ardly  know  'im." 

And  from  that  time,  Daddy  and  Mummy  ceased  to  be 
thought  of  further  as  immediate  presences,  and  became  hero 
and  heroine  in  a  dream  of  tomorrow,  a  dream  of  returning 
happiness  when  life  was  dull,  of  release  and  vindication  when 
life  was  hard,  a  pleasant  dream,  a  hope,  a  basis  for  imagina- 
tive anticipations  and  pillow  fairy  tales,  sleeping  Parents 
like  those  sleeping  Kings  who  figure  in  the  childhood  of  na- 
tions, like  King  Arthur  or  Barbarossa.  Sometimes  it  was 
one  parent  and  sometimes  it  was  the  other  that  dominated 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE        73 

the  thought,  "When  Mummy  comes  back.  .  .  .  When  Daddy 
comes  back." 

Joan  learnt  very  soon  to  say  it  too. 

§8 

Death  was  too  big  a  thing  for  Peter  to  comprehend.  He 
had  hardly  begun  yet  with  life.  And  he  had  made  not  even 
a  beginning  with  religion.  He  had  never  been  baptized;  he 
had  learnt  no  prayers  at  his  mother's  knee.  The  priceless 
Mary  had  come  to  the  Stublands  warranted  a  churchwoman, 
but  as  with  so  many  of  her  class,  her  orthodoxy  had  been 
only  a  professional  uniform  to  cloak  a  very  keen  hostility 
and  contempt  for  the  clergy,  and  she  dropped  quite  readily 
into  the  ways  of  a  household  in  which  religion  was  entirely 
ignored.  The  first  Peter  heard  of  religion  was  at  the  age  of 
four  and  a  half,  and  that  was  from  a  serious  friend  of 
Mary's,  a  Particular  Baptist,  who  came  for  a  week's  visit  to 
The  Ingle-Nook.  The  visitor  was  really  distressed  at  the 
spiritual  outlook  of  the  two  children.  She  borrowed  Peter 
for  a  "little  walk."  She  thought  she  would  begin  with  him 
and  try  Joan  afterwards.  Then  as  plainly  and  impressively 
as  possible  she  imparted  the  elements  of  her  faith  to  Peter 
and  taught  him  a  brief,  simple  prayer.  "He's  a  Love,"  she 
told  Mary,  ' '  and  so  Quick !  It 's  a  shime  to  keep  him  such  a 
little  heathen.  I  didn't  say  that  prayer  over  twice  before 
he  had  it  Pat." 

Mary  was  rather  moved  by  her  friend's  feelings.  She  felt 
that  she  was  going  behind  the  back  of  the  aunts,  but  never- 
theless she  saw  no  great  harm  in  what  had  happened.  The 
deaths  of  Arthur  and  Dolly  had  shaken  Mary's  innate  scep- 
ticism; she  had  a  vague  feeling  that  there  might  be  grave 
risks,  well  worth  consideration,  beyond  the  further  edge  of 
life. 

Aunt  Phyllis  was  the  first  of  the  responsible  people  over- 
head to  discover  what  had  happened.  Peter  loved  his 
prayer;  it  was  full  of  the  most  beautiful  phrases;  no  words 
had  ever  so  filled  his  mouth  and  mind.  There  was  for  ex- 
ample, "For  Jesus  Krice  sake  Amen."  Like  a  song.  You 
could  use  it  anywhere.  Aunt  Phyllis  found  him  playing 


74  JOAN  AND  PETER 

trains  with  his  bricks  in  the  nursery  one  afternoon.  "Hoo! 
Chuff-Chuff.  Chuff-Chuff.  Change  for  Reigate,  change  for 
London.  For  Jesus  Krice  sake  Amen. ' ' 

Aunt  Phyllis  sat  down  in  the  little  chair.  "Peter,"  she 
said,  "who  is  this  Jesus  Krice?" 

Peter  was  reluctant  to  give  information.  "I  know  all 
about  'im,"  he  said,  and  would  at  first  throw  no  other  light 
on  the  matter. 

Then  he  relented  and  told  a  wonder.  He  turned  his  back 
on  his  brick  train  and  drew  close  to  Aunt  Phyllis.  His 
manner  was  solemn  and  impressive  exactly  as  Mary's 
friend's  had  been;  his  words  were  as  slow  and  deliberate. 
"Jesus  Krice  could  go  dead  and  come  alive  again,"  he  said, 
"over  and  over,  whenever  He  wanted  to." 

And  having  paused  a  moment  to  complete  the  effect  of 
this  marvel,  Peter  turned  about  again,  squatted  down  like  a 
little  brown  holland  mushroom  with  a  busy  little  knob  on 
the  top,  and  resumed  his  shouting.  "Hoo!  Chuff-Chuff. 
Chuff-Chuff.  Chuff." 


§  9 

One  day  Mary  with  an  unaccustomed  urgency  in  her  man- 
ner hurried  Joan  and  Peter  out  of  the  garden  and  into  the 
nursery,  and  there  tidied  them  up  with  emphasis.  Joan 
showed  fight  a  bit  but  not  much;  Peter  was  thinking  of 
something  else  and  was  just  limp.  Then  Mary  took  them 
down  to  the  living-room,  the  big  low  room  with  the  ingle- 
nook  and  the  dining-table  in  the  far  bay  beside  the  second 
fireplace.  There  they  beheld  a  large  female  Visitor  of  the 
worst  sort.  They  approached  her  with  extreme  reluctance, 
impelled  by  Mary's  gentle  but  persistent  hand.  The  Visitor 
was  sitting  in  the  window-seat  with  Aunt  Phyllis  beside  her. 
And  Aunt  Phoebe  was  standing  before  the  little  fireplace. 
But  these  were  incidental  observations;  the  great  fact  was 
the  Visitor. 

She  was  the  largest  lady  that  Peter  had  ever  seen ;  she  had 
a  plumed  hat  with  black  chiffon  and  large  purple  bows  and  a 
brim  of  soft  black  stuff  and  suchlike  things,  and  she  wore  a 
large  cape  in  three  tiers  and  a  large  black  feather  boa  that 


FIRST  IMPRESSIONS  OF  THE  UNIVERSE        75 

hissed  when  she  moved  and  disseminated  feathers.  Her 
shoulders  were  enormously  exaggerated  by  a  kind  of  vast 
epaulette,  and  after  the  custom  of  all  loyal  Anglicans  in  those 
days  her  neck  was  tightly  swathed  about  and  adorned  with 
a  big  purple  bow.  Everything  she  wore  had  been  decorated 
and  sewn  upon,  and  her  chequered  skirts  below  were  cut  out 
by  panels  and  revelations  of  flounced  purple.  In  the  midst 
of  this  costume,  beneath  the  hat  and  a  pale  blonde  fuss  of 
hair,  was  set  a  large,  pale,  freckled,  square-featured  face 
with  two  hard  blue  eyes  and  a  fascinating  little  tussock  of 
sandy  hair  growing  out  of  one  cheek  that  instantly  captured 
the  eye  of  the  little  boy.  And  out  of  the  face  proceeded  a 
harsh  voice,  slow,  loud,  and  pitched  in  that  note  of  arrogance 
which  was  the  method  of  the  ruling  class  in  those  days.  ' '  So 
these  are  our  little  "Wards,"  said  the  voice,  and  as  she  spoke 
her  lips  wrinkled  and  her  teeth  showed. 

She  turned  to  Phyllis  with  a  confidential  air,  but  spoke 
still  in  the  same  clear  tones.  "Which  is  the  By-blow,  my 
dear,  the  Boy  or  the  Gel?" 

"Lady  Charlotte!"  exclaimed  Phyllis,  and  then  spoke  in- 
audibly,  explaining  something. 

But  Peter  made  a  note  of  "By-blow."  It  was  a  lovely 
word. 

"Not  even  in  Black.  They  ought  to  wear  Black,"  he 
heard  the  big  lady  say. 

Then  he  found  himself  being  scrutinized. 

"Haugh!"  said  the  big  lady,  making  a  noise  like  the 
casual  sounds  emitted  by  large  wading  birds.  "They  both 
take  after  the  Sydenhams,  anyhow.  They  might  be  brother 
and  sister!" 

' '  Practically  they  are, ' '  said  Aunt  Phoebe. 

Lady  Charlotte  confuted  her  with  an  unreal  smile.  "Prac- 
tically not,"  she  said  decisively. 

There  was  a  little  pause.  "Well,  Master  Stubland,"  said 
the  Visitor  abruptly  and  quite  terrifyingly.  "What  have 
you  got  to  say  for  yourself?" 

As  Peter  had  not  yet  learnt  to  swear  freely,  he  had  noth- 
ing to  say  for  himself  just  at  that  moment. 

"Not  very  Bright  yet,"  said  Lady  Charlotte  goadingly. 
"I  suppose  they  have  run  wild  hitherto." 


76  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"It  was  poor  Arthur's  wish '  began  Aunt  Phyllis. 

"We  must  alter  all  that  now,"  Lady  Charlotte  inter- 
rupted. "Tell  me  your  name,  little  boy." 

"Peter  Picktoe,"  said  Peter  with  invention.  "You  going 
to  stop  here  long  ? ' ' 

"So  you've  found  your  tongue  at  last,"  said  Lady  Char- 
lotte. "That's  only  your  nickname.  What's  your  proper 
name?" 

' '  Can  we  go  out  in  the  garden  now,  Auntie  ? ' '  said  Peter ; 
' '  and  play  at  By-blows  ? ' ' 

"Garden  now,"  said  Joan. 

"He's  Brighter  than  you  seem  to  think,"  said  Aunt 
Phoebe  with  gentle  sarcasm. 

"Commina  Garden,"  said  Joan,  tugging  at  Peter's  pina- 
fore. 

"But  I  must  ask  him  his  name  first,"  said  Lady  Charlotte, 
"and,"  with  growing  firmness,  "he  must  tell  it  me.  Come! 
What  is  your  name,  my  dear  ? ' ' 

"Peter,"  prompted  Mary. 

"Peter,"  said  Peter,  satisfied  that  it  was  a  silly  game  and 
anxious  to  get  it  over  and  away  from  this  horror  as  soon  as 
possible. 

"And  who  gave  you  that  name?" 

"Nobody;  it's  mine,"  said  Peter. 

"Isn't  the  poor  child  even  beginning  to  learn  his  Cate- 
chism ? ' '  asked  Lady  Charlotte. 

"Yes,  the  garden,"  said  Aunt  Phrebe  to  Mary,  and  the 
scene  began  to  close  upon  the  children  as  they  moved  gar- 
denward.  Joan  danced  ahead.  Peter  followed  thoughtfully 
before  Mary's  gentle  urgency.  What  was  that  last  word?" 
"Cattymism?"  Then  a  fresh  thought  occurred  to  him. 

"Mary,"  said  Peter,  in  an  impassioned  and  all  too  audible 
undertone;  "look.  She's  got  a  Whisker.  Here!  Troof!" 

"It  was  my  brother's  wish-,"  Phyllis  was  explaining  as 
the  children  disappeared  through  the  door.  .  .  . 

"It  isn't  the  modern  way  to  begin  so  early  with  rote- 
learning,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe;  "the  little  fellow's  still  not 
five." 

"He's  a  pretty  good  size." 


77 


"Because  we  haven't  worried  his  mind  yet.  Milk,  light, 
play,  like  a  happy  little  animal." 

"We  must  change  all  that  now,"  said  Lady  Charlotte 
Sydenham  with  conviction. 


CHAPTER  THE  FIFTH 

THE  CHRISTENING 

§    1 

EDY  CHARLOTTE  SYDENHAM  was  one  of  thoss 
large,  ignorant,  ruthless,  low-church,  wealthy,  and 
well-born  ladies  who  did  so  much  to  make  England 
what  it  was  in  the  days  before  the  Great  War.  She  was  edu- 
cated with  the  utmost  care  by  totally  illiterate  governesses 
who  were  ladies  by  birth,  chiefly  on  the  importance  and  priv- 
ileges of  her  social  position,  the  Anglican  faith  and  Mrs. 
Strickland's  "Queens  of  England";  she  had  French  from  a 
guaranteed  Protestant  teacher  and  German  from  a  North 
German  instructress  (Lutheran  Protestant),  who  also  taught 
her  to  play  the  piano  with  the  force  and  precision  of  a  crack 
regiment  of  cavalry.  Subsequently  she  had  improved  her 
mind  by  reading  memoirs  and  biographies  of  noble  and  dis- 
tinguished people  and  by  travel  amidst  obvious  scenery  and 
good  foreign  hotels.  She  had  married  at  two-and-thirty 
when  things  were  beginning  to  look  rather  doubtful  for  her. 

Old  Mr.  Sydenham,  who  had  made  his  money  and  under- 
mined his  health  in  India  in  the  John  Company  days,  had 
been  fifty-four,  and  from  the  very  outset  she  had  been  ever  so 
much  too  much  for  him.  At  sixty-five  he  had  petered  out 
like  an  exhausted  lode.  She  had  already  got  an  abject  con- 
fidential maid  into  thorough  training,  and  was  fully  pre- 
pared for  widowhood.  She  hung  out  big  black  bonnets  and 
expensive  black  clothes  upon  her  projections,  so  as  to  look 
larger  than  ever,  and  took  her  place  and  even  more  than  her 
place,  very  resolutely,  among  the  leaders  of  the  county  Angli- 
cans. 

She  had  early  mastered  the  simple  arts  of  county  family 
intercourse.  Her  style  in  contradiction  was  very  good,  her 
insults  were  frequently  witty,  she  could  pretend  to  love 
horses,  there  was  no  need  for  her  to  pretend  to  despise  and 

78 


THE  CHRISTENING  79 

hate  tradesmen  and  working  people,  and  she  kept  herself 
well-informed  upon  the  domestic  details  of  the  large  and 
spreading  family  of  the  ' '  Dear  Queen. ' '  She  was  very  good 
at  taking  down  impertinent  people,  and  most  people  struck 
her  as  impertinent ;  she  could  make  a  young  man  or  a  plain 
girl  or  a  social  inferior  "feel  small"  quicker  (and  smaller) 
than  almost  any  one  in  that  part  of  Surrey.  She  was  a 
woman  without  vices ;  her  chief  pleasure  was  to  feel  all  right 
and  important  and  the  centre  of  things,  and  to  that  her  maid 
as  a  sort  of  grand  Vizieress,  her  well-disciplined  little  house- 
hold and  her  choice  of  friends  ministered.  The  early  fear 
of  "Romanists"  in  which  she  had  been  trained  had  been  a 
little  dispelled  by  the  wider  charities  of  maturity,  but  she 
held  secularists  and  socialists  in  an  ever-deepening  abhor- 
rence. They  planned,  she  knew,  to  disturb  the  minds  of  the 
lower  classes,  upset  her  investments,  behead  the  Dear  Queen, 
and  plunge  the  whole  world  into  vice  and  rapine  and  Sab- 
bath-breaking. She  interested  herself  in  such  leisure  as  the 
care  of  her  own  health  and  comfort  left  her,  in  movements 
designed  to  circumvent  and  defeat  the  aims  of  these  enemies 
of  God  and  (all  that  was  worth  considering  in)  Man,  She 
even  countenanced  quite  indulgent  charities  if  they  seemed 
designed  to  take  the  wind  out  of  the  sails  of  socialism.  She 
drove  about  the  district  in  a  one-horse  carriage  and  delivered 
devastating  calls. 

Such  was  the  lady  whom  Arthur  had  made  one  of  the  four 
guardians  of  his  little  son  and  niece.  He  had  seen  her  twice ; 
he  had  rather  liked  a  short  speech  of  five  sentences  she  made 
at  a  Flower  Show,  and  he  had  heard  her  being  extremely 
rude  to  a  curate.  He  believed  her  to  be  wealthy  and  trust- 
worthy and  very  well  suited  to  act  as  a  counter  influence  to 
any  extravagant  tendencies  there  might  be  in  Aunt  Phrebe. 
Also  she  was  Dolly's  cousin,  and  appointing  her  had  seemed 
a  sort  of  compensation  for  altering  his  will  without  Dolly's 
knowledge.  Besides,  it  had  been  very  unlikely  that  she 
would  ever  act.  And  he  had  been  in  a  hurry  when  he  altered 
his  will,  and  could  not  think  of  any  one  else. 

Now  Lady  Charlotte  was  not  by  any  means  satisfied  by 
her  visit  to  The  Ingle-Nook.  The  children  looked  unusually 
big  for  their  years  and  disrespectful  and  out  of  hand.  It 


80  JOAN  AND  PETER 

was  clear  they  had  not  taken  to  her.  The  nurse,  too,  lad  a 
sort  of  unbroken  look  in  her  eye  that  was  unbecoming  in  a 
menial  position.  The  aunts  were  odd  persons;  Phyllis  was 
much  too  disposed  to  accentuate  the  father's  wishes,  and 
Lady  Charlotte  had  a  most  extraordinary  and  indecent  feel- 
ing all  the  time  she  was  talking  to  her  that  Aunt  Phoebe 
wasn't  wearing  staj^s.  (Could  the  woman  have  forgotten 
them,  or  was  it  deliberate?  It  was  like  pretending  to  be 
clothed  when  you  were  really  naked.) 

Their  conversation  had  been  queer,  most  queer.  They  did 
not  seem  to  realize  that  she  was  by  way  of  being  a  leader  in 
the  county  and  accustomed  to  being  listened  to  with  defer- 
ence. Nearly  everything  she  said  they  had  quietly  contra- 
dicted or  ignored.  The  way  in  which  the  children  were 
whisked  away  from  her  presence  was  distinctly  disrespect- 
ful. She  had  a  right,  it  was  her  duty,  to  look  at  them  well 
and  question  them  clearly  about  their  treatment,  to  see  that 
they  had  proper  treatment,  and  it  was  necessary  that  they 
should  fully  understand  her  importance  in  their  lives.  But 
those  two  oddly-dressed  young  women — youngish  women, 
rather,  for  probably  they  were  both  over  thirty — did  not 
themselves  seem  to  understand  that  she  was  naturally  the 
Principal  Guardian. 

Phyllis  had  been  constantly  referring  to  the  wishes  of  this 
Stubland  person  who  had  married  George  Sydenham  's  Dolly. 
Apparently  the  woman  supposed  that  those  wishes  were  to 
override  every  rational  consideration  for  the  children's  wel- 
fare. After  all,  the  boy  was  as  much  Dolly's  child  as  a 
Stubland,  and  as  for  the  girl,  except  that  the  Stublands  had 
been  allowed  to  keep  her,  she  wasn't  a  Stublaud  at  all.  She 
wasn't  anything  at  all.  She  was  pure  Charity.  There  was 
not  the  slightest  obligation  upon  Any  one  to  do  Anything 
for  her.  Making  her  out  to  be  an  equal  with  a  legitimate 
child  was  just  the  subversive,  wrong-headed  sort  of  thing 
these  glorified  shoddy-makers,  the  Stublands,  would  do.  But 
like  to  like.  Their  own  genealogy  probably  wouldn't  bear 
scrutiny  for  six  generations.  She  ought  to  be  trained  as  a 
Maid.  There  were  none  too  many  trained  Maids  nowadays. 
But  Arthur  Stubland  had  actually  settled  money  on  her. 

There  was  much  to  put  right  in  this  situation,  a  great  occa- 


THE  CHRISTENING  81 

sion  for  a  large,  important  lady  to  impress  herself  tremend- 
ously 011  a  little  group  of  people  insultingly  disposed  to  be 
unaware  of  her.  The  more  she  thought  the  matter  over  the 
more  plainly  she  saw  her  duty  before  her.  She  did  not  talk 
to  servants;  no  lady  talks  to  servants;  but  it  was  her  habit 
to  think  aloud  during  the  ministrations  of  Unwin,  her  maid, 
and  often  Unwin  would  overhear  and  reply  quite  helpfully. 

"It's  an  odd  job  I've  got  with  these  two  new  Wards  of 
mine,"  she  said. 

"They  put  too  much  on  you,  m'lady,"  said  Unwin,  pin- 
ning. 

"I  shall  do  what  is  Right.  I  shall  see  that  what  is  Right 
is  done." 

"You  don't  spare  yourself  enough,  m'lady." 

"I  must  go  over  again  and  again.  Those  women  don't  like 
me.  I  disturb  them.  They're  up  to  no  good." 

"It  won't  be  the  first  Dark  Place,  m'lady,  you've  thrown 
light  into." 

The  lady  surveyed  her  reflection  in  the  glass  with  a  know- 
ing expression.  She  knitted  her  brows,  partly  closed  one 
eye,  and  nodded  slowly  as  she  spoke. 

"There's  something  queer  about  the  boy's  religious  in- 
struction. It's  being  kept  back.  Now  why  did  they  get  em- 
barrassed when  I  asked  who  were  the  godparents?  I  ought 
to  have  followed  that  up." 

"My  godfathers  and  godmothers  wherein  I  was  made," 
murmured  Unwin,  with  the  quiet  satisfaction  of  the  well-in- 
structed. 

"Properly  it's  the  business  of  the  godparents.  I  have  a 
right  to  know." 

"I  suppose  the  poor  boy  has  godparents,  m'lady,"  said 
Unwin,  coming  up  from  obscure  duties  with  the  skirt. 

"But  of  course  he  has  godparents!" 

"Pardon  me,  m'lady,  but  not  of  course." 

"But  what  do  you  mean,  Unwin?" 

"I  hardly  like  to  say  it,  m'lady,  of  relations,  'owever  dis- 
tant, of  ours.  Still,  m'lady " 

"Don't  Chew  it  about,  Unwin." 

"Then  I  out  with  it,  m'lady.  'Ave  they  been  baptized, 
m'lady,  either  of  them?  'Ave  they  been  baptized?" 


82  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  2 

Before  a  fortnight  was  out  Lady  Charlotte  had  made  two 
more  visits  to  The  Ingle-Nook,  she  had  had  an  acrimonious 
dispute  upon  religious  questions  with  Phoebe,  and  she  was 
well  on  her  way  to  the  terrible  realization  that  these  two  ap- 
parently imbecile  ladies  in  the  shapeless  "arty"  dresses  were 
really  socialists  and  secularists — of  course,  like  all  other 
socialists  and  secularists,  "of  the  worst  type."  It  was  im- 
possible that  those  two  unfortunate  children  should  be  left  in 
their  aunts'  "clutches,"  and  she  prepared  herself  with  a 
steadily  increasing  determination  and  grandeur  to  seize  upon 
and  take  over  and  rescue  these  two  innocent  souls  from  the 
moral  and  spiritual  destruction  that  threatened  them. 
Once  in  her  hands,  Lady  Charlotte  was  convinced  it  would 
not  be  too  late  to  teach  the  little  fellow  a  proper  respect  for 
those  in  authority  over  him  and  to  bring  home  to  the  girl  an 
adequate  sense  of  that  taint  upon  her  Ife  of  which  she  was 
still  so  shockingly  unaware.  The  boy  must  be  taught  not  to 
call  attention  to  people's  physical  peculiarities,  and  to  an- 
swer properly  when  spoken  to ;  a  certain  sharpness  would  not 
be  lost  upon  him;  and  it  was  but  false  kindness  to  the  girl 
to  let  her  grow  up  in  ignorance  of  her  disadvantage.  Sooner 
or  later  it  would  have  to  be  brought  home  to  her,  and  the 
later  it  was  the  more  difficult  would  it  be  for  her  to  accept 
her  proper  position  with  a  becoming  humility.  And  a  thing 
of  immediate  urgency  was,  of  course,  the  baptism  of  both 
these  little  lost  souls. 

In  pursuit  of  these  entirely  praiseworthy  aims  Lady 
Charlotte  was  subjected  to  a  series  of  very  irritating  rebuffs 
that  did  but  rouse  her  to  a  greater  firmness.  On  her  fourth 
visit  she  was  not  even  allowed  to  see  the  children ;  the  spe- 
cious excuse  was  made  that  they  were  "out  for  a  walk,"  and 
when  she  passed  that  over  forgivingly  and  said:  "It  does 
not  matter  very  much.  What  I  want  to  arrange  today  is  the 
business  of  the  Christening,"  both  aunts  began  to  answer  at 
once  and  in  almost  identical  words.  Phoebe  gave  way  to  her 
sister.  "If  their  parents  had  wanted  them  Christened,"  said 
Aunt  Phyllis,  "there  was  ample  time  for  them  to  have  had 
it  done." 


THE  CHRISTENING  83 

"We  are  the  parents  now,"  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"And  two  of  us  are  quite  of  the  parents'  mind." 

"You  forget  that  I  also  speak  for  my  nephew  Oswald," 
said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"But  do  you?"  said  Aunt  Phyllis,  with  almost  obtruded 
incredulity. 

"Certainly,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  with  a  sweeping,  tri- 
umphant gesture,  a  conclusive  waving  of  the  head. 

"You  know  he  is  on  his  way  back  from  Uganda?"  Aunt 
Phyllis  remarked  with  an  unreal  innocence. 

Lady  Charlotte  had  not  known.  But  she  stood  up  gal- 
lantly to  the  blow.  "I  know  he  will  support  me  by  insisting 
upon  the  proper  treatment  of  these  poor  children." 

"What  can  a  man  know  about  the  little  souls  of  children?" 
cried  Phoebe. 

But  Aunt  Phyllis  restrained  her.  "I  have  no  doubt  Mr. 
Sydenham  will  have  his  own  views  in  the  matter,"  said 
Phyllis. 

"I  have  no  doubt  he  will,"  said  Lady  Charlotte  impos- 
ingly. .  .  . 

p]ven  Mary  showed  the  same  disposition  to  insolence.  As 
Lady  Charlotte  was  returning  along  the  little  path  through 
the  bushes  that  ran  up  to  the  high  road  where  her  carriage 
with  the  white  horse  waited,  she  saw  Mary  and  the  children 
approaching.  Peter  saw  Lady  Charlotte  first  and  flew  back. 
"Lady  wiv  de  Whisker!"  he  said  earnestly  and  breathlessly, 
and  dodged  off  into  the  bushes.  Joan  hesitated,  and  fled 
after  him.  By  a  detour  the  fluttering  little  figures  outflanked 
the  great  lady  and  escaped  homeward. 

"Come  here,  children!"  she  cried.     "I  want  you." 

Spurt  on  the  part  of  the  children. 

"They  are  really  most  distressingly  Rude,"  she  said  to 
Mary.  "It's  inexcusable.  Tell  them  to  come  back.  I  have 
something  to  say  to  them." 

"They  won't,  Mum,"  said  Mary — though  surely  aware  of 
the  title. 

"But  I  tell  you  to." 

"It's  no  good,  Mum.  It's  shyness.  If  they  won't  come, 
they  won't." 

"But,  my  good  woman,  have  you  no  control?" 


84  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"They  always  race  'ome  like  that,"  said  Mary. 

"Then  you  aren't  fit  to  control  them.  As  one  of  the 
children's  guardians,  I But  we  shall  see." 

She  went  her  way,  a  stately  figure  of  passion. 

"Orty  old  Ag,"  said  Mary,  and  dismissed  the  encounter 
from  her  mind. 

§  3 

"You  got  your  rights  like  anybody,  m'lady,"  said  Unwin. 

It  was  that  phrase  put  it  into  Lady  Charlotte's  head 
to  consult  her  solicitor.  He  opened  new  vistas  to  her  imagi- 
nation. 

Lady  Charlotte's  solicitor  was  a  lean,  long,  faded  blond 
of  forty-five  or  so.  He  was  the  descendant  of  five  genera- 
tions of  Lincoln's  Inn  solicitors,  a  Low  Churchman,  a 
man  of  notoriously  pure  life,  and  very  artful  indeed.  He 
talked  in  a  thin,  high  tenor  voice,  and  was  given  to  nibbling 
his  thumbnail  and  wincing  with  his  eyes  as  he  talked.  His 
thumbnail  produced  gaps  of  indistinctness  in  his  speech. 

"Powers  of  a  guardian,  m'lady.  Defends  upon  whafower 
want  exercise  over  thinfant." 

"I  do  wish  you'd  keep  your  thumb  out  of  your  mouth," 
said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"Sorry,"  said  Mr.  Grimes,  wincing  and  trying  painfully 
to  rearrange  his  arm.  "Still,  I'd  like  to  know — position." 

"There  are  three  other  guardians." 

"Generous  allowance,"  said  Mr.  Grimes.  "Do  you  all 
act?" 

"One  of  us  is  lost  in  the  Wilds  of  Africa.  The  others  I 
want  to  consult  you  about.  They  do  not  seem  to  me  to  be 
fit  and  proper  persons  to  be  entrusted  with  the  care  of  young 
children,  and  they  do  not  seem  disposed  to  afford  me  a 
proper  share  in  the  direction  of  affairs." 

"Ah!"  said  Mr.  Grimes,  replacing  his  thumb.  "Sees 
t'point  t'Chacery." 

Lady  Charlotte  disregarded  this  comment.  She  wished  to 
describe  Aunts  Phyllis  and  Phoebe  in  her  own  words. 

"They  are  quite  extraordinary  young  women — not  by 
any  stretch  of  language  to  be  called  Ladies.  They  dress  in 


THE  CHRISTENING  85 

that   way — like   the    pictures   in   the    Grosvenor   Gallerv." 

"^Esthetic?" 

"I  could  find  a  harsher  word  for  it.  They  smoke.  Not 
a  nice  thing  for  children  to  see.  I  suspect  them  strongly  of 
vegetarianism.  From  something  one  of  them  said.  In  which 
case  the  children  will  not  be  properly  nourished.  And  they 
speak  quite  openly  of  socialism  in  front  of  their  charges. 
Neither  of  the  poor  little  creatures  had  been  bought  a  scrap 
of  mourning.  Not  a  scrap.  I  doubt  if  they  have  even  been 
made  to  understand  that  their  parents  are  dead.  But  that 
is  only  the  beginning.  I  am  totally  unable  to  ascertain 
whether  either  of  the  poor  mites  has  been  christened.  Ap- 
parently they  have  not.  ..." 

Mr.  Grimes  withdrew  his  thumb  for  a  moment.  "You 
are  perfectly  within  yer  rights — insisting — knowing" — 
thumb  replaced — "all  thlese  things." 

"Exactly.  And  in  having  my  say  in  their  general  up- 
bringing." 

"How  far  do  they  prevent  that?" 

"Oh;  they  get  in  my  way.  They  send  the  children  out 
whenever  they  feel  I  am  coming.  They  do  not  listen  to  me 
and  accept  any  suggestions  I  make.  Oh! — sniff  at  it." 

"And  you  want  to  make  'em?" 

"I  want  to  do  my  duty  by  those  two  children,  Mr. 
Grimes.  It  is  a  charge  that  has  been  laid  upon  me." 

Mr.  Grimes  reflected,  rubbing  his  thumb  thoughtfully  along 
the  front  of  his  teeth. 

"They  are  getting  no  religious  instruction  whatever," 
said  Lady  Charlotte.  "None." 

"Hot  was  the  'ligion  father?"  said  Mr.  Grimes  suddenly. 

Lady  Charlotte  was  not  to  be  deterred  by  a  silly  and 
inopportune  question.  She  just  paused  for  an  instant  and 
reddened.  "He  was  a  member  of  the  Church  of  England," 
she  said. 

"Even  if  he  wasn't,"  said  Mr.  Grimes  understandingly, 
but  with  thumb  still  in  place,  "Ligion  necessary  t 'welfare. 
Case  of  Besant  Chil'n  zample.  Thlis  is  Klistian  country." 

"I  sometimes  doubt  it,"  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"Legally,"  said  Mr.  Grimes. 

"If  the  law  did  its  dutv!" 


86  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"You  don't  wanner  goatallaw  fewcan  'void  it?"  asked  Mr. 
Grimes,  grasping  his  job. 

Lady  Charlotte  assumed  an  expression  of  pained  protest, 
and  lifted  one  black-gloved  hand.  Mr.  Grimes  hastily  with- 
drew his  thumbnail  from  his  mouth.  "I  am  saying',  Lady 
Charlotte,  that  what  you  want  to  do  is  to  assert  your  author- 
ity, if  possible,  without  legal  proceedings." 

He  was  trying  to  get  the  whole  situation  clear  in  his  mind 
before  he  tendered  any  exact  advice.  Most  children  who 
are  quarrelled  over  in  this  way  gravitate  very  rapidly  into 
the  care  of  the  Lord  Chancellor;  to  that  no  doubt  these 
children  would  come;  but  Lady  Charlotte  was  a  prosperous 
lady  with  a  lot  of  fight  in  her  and  a  knack  of  illegality,  and 
before  these  children  became  Wards  in  Chancery  she  might, 
under  suitable  provocation,  run  up  a  very  considerable  little 
bill  for  expenses  and  special  advice  in  extracting  her  from 
such  holes  as  she  got  herself  into.  It  is  an  unjust  libel  upon 
solicitors  that  they  tempt  their  clients  into  litigation.  So 
far  is  this  unjust  that  the  great  majority  will  spare  neither 
time  nor  expense  in  getting  a  case  settled  out  of  court. 

Nor  did  Lady  Charlotte  want  to  litigate.  Courts  are  un- 
certain, irritating  places.  She  just  wanted  to  get  hold  of 
her  two  wards,  and  to  deal  with  them  in  such  a  way  as  to 
inflict  the  maximum  of  annoyance  and  humiliation  upon 
those  queer  Stubland  aunts.  And  to  save  the  children 
from  socialism,  secularism,  Catholicism,  and  all  the  wander- 
ing wolves  of  opinion  that  lie  in  wait  for  the  improperly 
trained. 

But  also  she  went  in  fear  of  Oswald.  Oswald  was  one  of 
the  few  human  beings  of  whom  she  went  in  awe.  He  was 
always  rude  and  overbearing  with  her.  From  the  very  first 
moment  when  he  had  seen  her  as  his  uncle's  new  wife,  he 
had  realixed  in  a  flash  of  boyish  intuition  that  if  he  did 
not  get  in  with  an  insult  first,  he  would  be  her  victim.  So 
his  first  words  to  her  had  been  an  apparently  involuntary 
"O  God!"  Then  he  had  pretended  to  dissemble  his  con- 
tempt with  a  cold  politeness.  Those  were  the  days  of  his 
good  looks ;  he  was  as  tall  and  big  as  he  was  ever  to  be,  and 
she  had  expected  a  "little  midshipmite, "  whom  she  would 


THE  CHRISTENING  87 

treat  like  a  child,  and  possibly  even  send  early  to  bed. 
From  the  first  she  was  at  a  disadvantage.  He  had  a  material 
hold  on  her  too,  now.  He  was  his  uncle's  heir  and  her 
Trustee;  and  she  had  the  belief  of  all  Victorian  women  in 
the  unlimited  power  of  Trustees  to  abuse  their  trust  unless 
they  are  abjectly  propitiated.  He  used  to  come  and  stay  in 
her  house  as  if  it  was  already  his  own;  the  servants  would 
take  their  orders  from  him.  She  was  assuring  Grimes  as 
she  had  assured  the  Stubland  aunts  that  he  was  on  her 
side;  "The  Sydenhams  are  all  sound  churchmen."  But 
even  as  she  said  this  she  saw  his  grim,  one-sided  face  and 
its  one  hard  intent  eye  pinning  her.  ''Acting  without  au- 
thority again,  my  good  aunt,"  he  would  say.  "You'll  get 
yourself  into  trouble  yet." 

That  was  one  of  his  invariable  stabs  whenever  he  came 
to  see  her.  Always  he  would  ask,  sooner  or  later,  in  that 
first  meeting : 

"Any  one  bagged  you  for  libel  yet?  No!  Or  insulting 
behaviour?  Some  one  will  get  you  sooner  or  later." 

"Anything  that  /  say  about  people,"  she  would  reply 
with  dignity,  "is  True,  Oswald." 

"They'll  double  the  damages  if  you  stick  that  out."  .  .  . 

And  she  saw  him  now  standing  beside  the  irritating, 
necessary  Grimes,  sardonically  ready  to  take  part  against 
her,  prepared  even  to  give  those  abominable  aunts  an  unen- 
durable triumph  over  her.  .  .  . 

"I  want  no  vulgar  litigation,"  she  said.  "Everything 
ought  to  be  done  as  quietly  as  possible.  There  is  no  need 
to  ventilate  the  family  affairs  of  the  Sydenhams,  and  par- 
ticularly when  I  tell  you  that  one  of  the  children  is " 

She  hesitated.  "Irregular." 

The  thumb  went  back,  and  Mr.  Grimes'  face  assumed  a 
diplomatic  innocence.  "Whascalled  a  love-shild?" 

"Exactly,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  with  a  nod  that  forbade 
all  research  for  paternity.  If  Joan  were  assumed  to  be  of 
Stubland  origin,  so  much  the  better  for  Lady  Charlotte's 
case.  ' '  Everything  must  be  done  quietly  and  privately, ' '  she 
said. 

"Sactly,"   said   Mr.    Grimes,   and  was   reminded   of  his 


88  JOAN  AND  PETER 

thumb  by  her  eye.  He  coughed,  put  his  arm  down,  and  sat 
up  in  his  chair.  "They,  have  possession  of  the  children!" 
he  said. 

"Should  I  be  here?"  she  appealed. 

"Ah!  That  gives  the  key  of  the  situation.  .  .  .  Would 
they  litigate  ? ' ' 

"Why  should  they?" 

"If  by  chance  you  got  possession?" 

"That  would  be  difficult." 

"But  not  impossible?  Perhaps  something  could  be  man- 
aged. With  my  assistance.  Once  or  twice  before  I  have 
had  cases  that  turned  on  the  custody  of  minors.  Custody, 
like  possession,  is  nine  points  of  the  law.  Then  they 
would  have  to  come  into  court." 

"We  want  nobody  to  come  into  court." 

"Exactly,  m'lady.  I  am  pointing  out  to  you  how  im- 
probable it  is  that  they  will  do  so.  I  am  gauging  their  dis- 
inclination. ' ' 

The  attitude  of  Mr.  Grimes  relaxed  unconsciously  until 
once  more  the  teeth  and  thumbnail  were  at  their  little 
play  again. 

He  continued  with  thoughtful  eyes  upon  his  client's  expres- 
sion. "Possibly  they  wouldn't  li'e  'nquiry  into  character." 

"Oh,  do  take  that  thumb  away!"  cried  Lady  Charlotte. 
"And  don't  lounge." 

"I'm  sorry,  m'lady,"  said  Mr.  Grimes,  sitting  up.  "I 
was  saying,  practically,  do  we  know  of  any  little  irregulari- 
ties, anything — I  won't  say  actually  immoral,  but  indiscreet, 
in  these  two  ladies'  lives?  Anything  they  wouldn't  like 
to  have  publicly  discussed.  In  the  case  of  most  people 
there's  a  Something.  Few  people  will  readily  and  cheer- 
fully face  a  discussion  of  Character.  Even  quite  innocent 
people." 

"They're  certainly  very  lax — very.  They  smoke.  In- 
ordinately. I  saw  the  cigarette  stains  on  their  fingers.  And 
unless  I  am  very  much  mistaken,  one  of  them — well" — 
Lady  Charlotte  leant  forward  towards  him  with  an  air  of 
scandalous  condescension — "she  wears  no  stays  at  all,  Mr. 
Grimes — none  at  all !  No !  She 's  a  very  queer  young 
woman  indeed  in  my  opinion." 


THE  CHRISTENING  89 

"M'm!  .  .  .  No  visitors  to  the  house — no  gentlemen,  for 
example — who  might  seem  a  little  dubious?" 

Lady  Charlotte  did  not  know.  "I  will  get  my  maid  to 
make  enquiries — discreetly.  \Ve  certainly  ought  to  know 
that." 

"The  elder  one  writes  poetry,"  she  threw  out. 

"We  must  see  to  that,  too.  If  we  can  procure  some  of 
that.  Nowadays  there  is  quite  a  quantity — of  very  indiscreet 
poetry.  Many  people  do  not  realize  the  use  that  might  be 
made  of  it  against  them.  And  even  if  the  poetry  is  not 
indiscreet,  it  creates  a  prejudice.  ..." 

He  proceeded  to  unfold  his  suggestions.  Lady  Charlotte 
must  subdue  herself  for  a  while  to  a  reassuring  demeanour 
towards  the  aunts  at  The  Ingle-Nook.  She  must  gain  the 
confidence  of  the  children.  "And  of  the  children's  maid!" 
he  said  acutely.  "She's  rather  an  important  factor." 

"She's  a  very  impertinent  young  woman,"  said  Lady 
Charlotte. 

"But  you  must  reassure  her  for  a  time,  Lady  Charlotte, 
if  the  children  are  to  come  to  you — ultimately." 

"I  can  make  the  sacrifice,"  the  lady  said;  "if  you  think 
it  is  my  duty." 

Meanwhile  Mr.  Grimes  would  write  a  letter,  a  temperate 
letter,  yet  "just  a  little  stiff  in  tone,"  pointing  out  the  legal 
and  enforceable  right  of  his  client  to  see  and  have  free  com- 
munication, with  the  children,  and  to  be  consulted  about 
their  affairs,  and  trusting  that  the  Misses  Stubland  would 
see  their  way  to  accord  these  privileges  without  further 
evasion. 

§  4 

The  Stubland  aunts  were  not  the  ladies  to  receive  a  solicit- 
or's letter  calmly.  They  were  thrown  into  a  state  of  extreme 
trepidation.  A  solicitor's  letter  had  for  them  the  powers 
of  an  injunction.  It  was  clear  that  Lady  Charlotte  must 
be  afforded  that  reasonable  access,  that  consultative  impor- 
tance to  which  she  was  entitled.  Phyllis  became  extremely 
reasonable.  Perhaps  they  had  been  a  little  disposed  to 
monopolize  the  children.  They  were  not  the  only  Madonnas 


90  JOAN  AND  PETER 

upon  the  tree.  That  was  Phyllis 's  response  to  this  threat. 
Phoebe  was  less  disposed  to  make  concessions.  "Those  chil- 
dren are  a  sacred  charge  to  us,"  she  said.  "What  can  a 
woman  of  that  sort  know  or  care  for  children?  Lapdogs 
are  her  children.  Let  us  make  such  concessions  as  we 
must,  but  let  us  guard  essentials,  Phyllis.  ...  As  the  apples 
of  our  eyes.  ..." 

In  the  wake  of  this  letter  came  Lady  Charlotte  herself, 
closely  supported  by  the  faithful  Unwin,  no  longer  combative, 
no  longer  actively  self-assertive,  but  terribly  suave.  Her 
movements  were  accompanied  by  unaccustomed  gestures  of 
urbanity,  done  chiefly  by  throwing  out  the  open  hand  side- 
ways, and  she  made  large,  kind  tenor  noises  as  reassuring  as 
anything  Mr.  Grimes  could  have  wished.  She  astonished 
Aunt  Phyllis  with  "Ha'ow  are  the  dear  little  things  today?" 

Mary  was  very  mistrustful,  and  Aunt  Phyllis  had  to  ex- 
postulate with  her.  "You  see,  Mary,  it  seems  she's  the  chil- 
dren's guardian  just  as  we  are.  They  must  see  a  little  of 
her.  ..." 

"And  ha-ow's  Peter?"  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"Very  well,  thank  you,  Lady  Charlotte,"  said  Mary. 

"Very  well,  thank  you  lazy  Cha'lot,"  said  Peter. 

"That's  right.  We  shall  soon  get  along  Famously.  And 
how's  my  little  Joan?" 

Joan  took  refuge  behind  Mary. 

4 '  Pee-Bo ! ' '  said  Lady  Charlotte  tremendously,  and  craned 
her  head. 

Peter  regarded  the  lady  incredulously.  He  wanted  to 
ask  a  question  about  the  whisker.  But  something  in  Mary 's 
grip  upon  his  wrist  warned  him  not  to  do  that.  In  this 
world,  he  remembered  suddenly,  there  are  Unspeakable 
Things.  Perhaps  this  was  one  of  them.  .  .  .  That  made  it 
all  the  more  fascinating,  of  course. 

Lady  Charlotte  was  shown  the  nursery;  she  stayed  to 
nursery  tea.  She  admired  everything  loudly. 

"And  so  these  are  your  Toys,  lucky  Peter.  Do  you  play 
with  them  all?" 

"Joan's  toys  too,"  said  Joan. 

"Such  a  Pretty  Room  !"  said  Lady  Charlotte  with  gestures 
of  approval.  "Such  a  Pretty  Outlook.  I  wonder  you 


THE  CHRISTENING  91 

didn't  make  it  the  Drawing-Room.  Isn't  it  a  pretty  room, 
Unwiii?" 

"Very  pritty,  m'lady." 

Very  skilfully  she  made  her  first  tentative  towards  the 
coup  she  had  in  mind. 

"One  day,  Mary,  you  must  bring  them  over  to  Tea  with 
me,"  she  said.  .  .  . 

"I  do  so  want  the  dear  children  to  come  over  to  me," 
she  said  presently  in  the  garden  to  aunts  Phyllis  and  Phcebe. 
"If  they  would  come  over  quite  informally — with  their  Mary. 
Just  to  Tea  and  scamper  about  the  shrubbery.  ..." 

Mary  and  Unwin  surveyed  the  garden  conversation  from 
the  nursery  window,  and  talked  sourly  and  distrustfully. 

"Been  with  'er  long?"  asked  Mary. 

"Seven  years,"  said  Unwin. 

"Purgat'ry?"  said  Mary. 

"She  'as  to  be  managed,"  said  Unwin. 

§  5 

The  day  of  the  great  coup  of  Lady  Charlotte  was  tragic 
and  painful  from  the  beginning.  Peter  got  up  wicked. 
It  was  his  custom,  and  a  very  bad  one,  to  bang  with  his 
spoon  upon  the  bottom  of  his  little  porringer  as  he  ate  his 
porridge.  It  had  grown  out  of  his  appreciation  of  the  noise 
the  spoon  made  as  he  dug  up  his  food.  Now,  as  Mary  said, 
he  '  d'librately  'ammered."  How  frequently  had  not  Mary 
told  him  he  would  do  it  "once  too  often!"  This  was  the 
once  too  often.  The  porridge  plate  cracked  and  broke,  and 
the  porridge  and  the  milk  and  sugar  escaped  in  horrid  hot 
gouts  and  lumps  over  tablecloth  and  floor  and  Peter's  knees. 
It  was  a  fearful  mess.  It  was  enough  to  cow  the  stoutest 
heart.  Peter,  a  great  boy  of  five,  lifted  up  his  voice  and 
wept. 

So  this  dire  day  began. 

Then  there  was  a  new  thin  summer  blouse,  a  glaring  white 
silk  thing,  for  Peter,  and  in  those  days  all  new  things 
meant  trouble  with  him.  It  was  put  on  after  a  hot  fight 
v;ith  Mary;  his  head  came  through  flushed  and  crumpled. 
But  Joan  accepted  her  new  blouse  as  good  as  gold.  Then 


i>2  JOAN  AND  PETER 

for  some  reason  the  higher  powers  would  not  let  us  go  and 
look  at  the  kittens,  the  dear  little  blind  kittens  in  the  out- 
house. There  were  six  of  them,  all  different,  for  the  Ingle- 
Nook  cat  was  a  generous,  large-minded  creature.  Only  after 
a  dispute  in  which  Joan  threatened  to  go  the  way  of  Peter 
was  "just  a  glimpse"  conceded.  And  they  were  softer  and 
squealier  and  warmer  than  anything  one  had  ever  imagined. 
We  wanted  to  linger.  Mary  talked  of  a  miracle.  "Any 
time,"  she  said,  "one  of  them  kitties  may  eat  up  all  the 
others.  Any  time.  Kitties  often  do  that.  But  it's  always 
the  best  one  does  it" 

We  wanted  to  stay  and  see  if  this  would  happen.  No! 
We  were  dragged  reluctantly  to  our  walk. 

Was  it  Peter's  fault  that  when  we  got  to  the  edge  of  the 
common  the  fence  of  Master's  paddock  had  been  freshly 
tarred!  Must  a  little  boy  test  the  freshness  of  the  paint 
on  every  fence  before  he  wriggles  half  under  it  and  stares 
at  Wonderland  on  the  other  side!  If  so,  this  was  a  new 
law. 

But  anyhow  here  we  were  in  trouble  once  more,  this 
beastly  new  white  blouse  "completely  spoilt,''  Mary  said, 
and  Mary  in  an  awful  stew.  The  walk  was  to  be  given  up 
and  we  were  to  go  home  in  dire  disgrace  and  change.  .  .  . 

Even  Aunt  Phyllis  turned  against  Peter.  She  looked  at 
him  and  said, ' '  O  Peter !  What  a  mess ! ' ' 

Then  it  was  that  sorrow  and  the  knowledge  of  death  came 
upon  Joan. 

She  was  left  downstairs  while  Peter  was  hauled  rather  than 
taken  upstairs  to  change,  and  in  that  atmosphere  of  unrest 
and  disaster  it  seemed  a  sweet  and  comforting  thing  to  do 
to  go  and  look  at  the  kittens  again.  But  beyond  the  corner 
of  the  house  she  saw  old  Groombridge,  the  Occasional  Gard- 
ener, digging  a  hole,  and  beside  him  in  a  pitiful  heap  lay  five 
wet  little  objects  and  close  at  hand  was  a  pail.  Dark  ap- 
prehension came  upon  Joan's  soul,  but  she  went  up  to  him 
nevertheless.  "What  you  been  doing  to  my  kittays?"  she 
asked. 

"I  drownded  five,'*  said  old  Groombridge  in  a  warm  and 
kindly  voice.     "But  I  kep*  the  best  un.     'E's  a  beair 
is." 


93 

"But  why  you  drownded  'em?"  asked  Joan. 

"Eh!  you  got  to  drown  kittens,  little  Missie,"  said  old 
Groombridge.  "Else  ud  be  too  many  of  um.  But  ollays 
there's  one  or  so  kep'.  Callum  Jubilee  I  reckon.  Tis  all 
the  go  this  year  agin." 

Joan  had  to  tell  some  one.  She  turned  about  towards  the 
house,  but  long  before  she  could  find  a  hearer  her  sorrowful 
news  burst  through  her.  Aunt  Pho3be  writing  Buskinian 
about  the  marvellous  purity  of  childish  intuitions  was  sud- 
denly disturbed  by  the  bitter  cry  of  Niobe  Joan  going  past 
beneath  the  window.  Joan  had  a  voluminous  voice  when  she 
was  fully  roused. 

"They  been  'n  dwouwnded  my  kittays,  Petah.  They 
been  'n  dwouwnded  my  kittays." 

§  6 

It  seemed  to  Mary  that  Lady  Charlotte's  invitation  came 
as  a  "perfect  godsend."  It  was  at  once  used  to  its  utmost 
value  to  distract  the  two  little  flushed  and  tearful  things 
from  their  distresses.  Great  expectations  were  aroused. 
That  very  afternoon  they  were  to  go  out  to  tea  to  Chast- 
lands,  a  lovely  place ;  they  were  to  have  a  real  ride  in  a  real 
carriage,  not  a  cab  like  the  station-cab  that  smells  of  straw, 
but  a  carriage:  and  Mary  was  coming  too,  she  was  going 
to  wear  her  best  hat  with  the  red  flower  and  enjoy  herself  "no 
end,"  and  there  would  be  cake  and  all  sorts  of  things  and  a 
big  shrubbery  to  play  in  and  a  flower  garden — oh!  miles 
bigger  than  our  garden.  "Only  you  mustn't  go  picking  the 
flowers,"  said  Mary.  "Lady  Charlotte  won't  like  that." 

Was  Auntie  Phyllis  coming  too? 

No,  Auntie  wasn't  coming  too;  she'd  love  to  come,  but 
she  couldn't.  .  .  . 

It  all  began  very  much  as  Mary  had  promised.  The 
carriage  with  the  white  horse  was  waiting  punctually  at  two 
o'clock  on  the  high  road  above  the  house.  There  was  a 
real  carpet,  green  with  a  yellow  coat-of-arms,  on  the  floor  of 
the  carriage,  and  the  same  coat-of-arms  on  the  panel  of  the 
door :  the  brass  door-handle  was  so  bright  and  attractive  that 
Mary  had  to  tell  Joan  to  keep  her  greedy  little  hands  off 


94  JOAN  AND  PETER 

it  or  she  would  fall  out.  They  drove  through  pine  woods 
for  a  time  and  then  across  a  great  common  with  geese  on  it, 
and  then  up  a  deep-hedged,  winding,  uphill  road  and  so  to 
an  open  road  that  lay  over  a  great  cornfield,  and  then  by  a 
snug  downland  village  of  thatched  white  cottages  very  gay 
with  flowers.  And  so  to  a  real  lodge  with  a  garden  round  it 
and  a  white-aproned  gate-keeper,  which  impressed  Mary 
very  favourably. 

' '  It 's  a  sort  of  park  she  has, ' '  said  Mary. 

As  they  drew  near  the  house  they  were  met  by  a  very  gay 
and  smiling  and  obviously  pretty  lady,  in  a  dress  of  blue 
cotton  stuff  and  flowers  in  her  hat.  She  had  round  blue 
eyes  and  glowing  cheeks  and  a  rejoicing  sort  of  voice. 

"Here  they  are!"  she  cried.  "Hullo,  old  Peter!  Hullo, 
old  Joan!  \Yould  you  like  to  get  out?" 

They  would. 

"Would  they  like  to  see  the  garden?" 

They  would. 

And  a  little  bit  of  "chockky"  each? 

Glances  for  approval  at  Mary  and  encouraging  nods  from 
Mary.  They  would.  They  got  quite  big  pieces  of  chocolate 
and  pouched  them  solemnly,  and  went  on  with  grave,  unsym- 
metrical  faces.  And  the  bright  lady  took  them  each  by  a 
hand  and  began  to  talk  of  flowers  and  birds  and  all  the  things 
they  were  going  to  see,  a  summerhouse,  a  croquet-poky  lawn, 
a  little  old  pony  stable,  a  churchy-perchy,  and  all  sorts  of 
things.  Particularly  the  churchy-perchy. 

Mary  dropped  behind  amicably. 

So  accompanied  it  was  not  very  dreadful  to  meet  the 
great  whisker-woman  herself  in  a  white  and  mauve  patterned 
dress  of  innumerable  flounces  and  a  sunshade  with  a  deep 
valance  to  it,  to  match.  She  didn't  come  very  near  to  the 
children,  but  waved  her  hand  to  them  and  crowed  in  what 
was  manifestly  a  friendly  spirit.  And  across  the  lawn  they 
saw  a  marvel,  a  lawn-mower  pushed  by  a  man  and  drawn  by 
a  little  piebald  pony  in  boots. 

"He  puts  on  his  booty-pootys  when  little  boys  have  to 
take  them  off,  to  walk  over  the  grassy  green  carpet,"  said 
the  blue  cotton  lady. 

Peter  was  emboldened  to  address  Lady  Charlotte. 


THE  CHRISTENING  95 

"Puts  on  'is  booty-pootys, "  he  said  impressivelj. 

"Wise  little  pony,"  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

They  saw  all  sorts  of  things,  the  stables,  the  summer- 
house,  a  little  pond  with  a  swan  upon  it,  a  lane  through  dark 
bushes,  and  so  they  came  to  the  church. 

§  7 

Lady  Charlotte  had  decided  to  christen  both  the  children. 

She  was  not  sure  whether  she  wanted  to  take  possession 
of  them  altogether,  in  spite  of  Mr.  Grimes'  suggestion.  Her 
health  was  uncertain,  at  any  time  she  might  have  to  go 
abroad;  she  was  liable  to  nervous  headaches  to  which  the 
proximity  of  captive  and  possibly  insurgent  children  would 
be  unhelpful,  and  her  two  pet  dogs  were  past  that  first 
happy  fever  of  youth  which  makes  the  presence  of  children 
acceptable.  And  also  there  was  Oswald — that  woman  had 
said  he  was  coming  home.  But  christened  Lady  Charlotte 
was  resolved  those  children  should  be,  at  whatever  cost.  It 
was  her  duty.  It  would  be  an  act  of  the  completest  self- 
vindication,  and  the  completest  vindication  of  sound  Anglican 
ideas.  And  once  it  was  done  it  would  be  done,  let  the 
Ingle-Nook  aunts  rage  ever  so  wildly. 

Within  a  quarter  of  a  mile  of  Chastlands  stood  a  little 
church  among  evergreen  trees,  Otfield  Church,  so  near  to 
Chastlauds  and  so  far  from  Otfield  that  Lady  Charlotte 
used  to  point  out,  "It's  practically  my  Chapel  of  Ease." 
Her  outer  shrubbery  ran  to  the  churchyard  wall,  and  she  had 
a  gate  of  her  own  and  went  to  church  through  a  respectful 
avenue  of  her  own  rhododendrons  and  in  by  a  convenient 
door.  Wiscott,  the  curate  in  charge,  was  an  agreeable,  easily 
trodden-on  young  man  with  a  wife  of  obscure  origins — Lady 
Charlotte  suspected  a  childhood  behind  some  retail  shop — 
and  abject  social  ambitions.  It  was  Wiscott  whose  bullying 
Arthur  had  overheard  when  he  conceived  his  admiration  for 
Lady  Charlotte.  Lady  Charlotte  had  no  social  prejudices; 
she  liked  these  neighbours  in  her  own  way  and  would  enter- 
tain them  to  tea  and  even  occasionally  to  lunch.  The  organ 
in  Otfield  church  was  played  in  those  days  by  a  terrified 
National  schoolmistress,  a  sound,  nice  churchwoman  of  the 


96  JOAN  AND  PETER 

very  lowest  educational  qualifications  permissible,  and  the 
sexton,  a  most  respectful  worthy  old  fellow,  eked  out  his 
income  as  an  extra  hand  in  Lady  Charlotte's  garden  and  was 
the  father  of  one  of  her  housemaids.  Moreover  he  was  the 
husband  of  a  richly  grateful  wife  in  whose  rheumatism  Lady 
Charlotte  took  quite  a  kindly  interest.  All  these  things  gave 
Lady  Charlotte  a  nice  homelike  feeling  in  God's  little  house 
in  Otfield;  God  seemed  to  come  nearer  to  her  there  and  to 
be  more  aware  of  her  importance  in  His  world  than  any- 
where else;  and  it  was  there  that  she  proposed  to  hold  the 
simple  ceremony  that  should  snatch  Peter  and  Joan  like 
brands  from  the  burning. 

Her  plans  were  made  very  carefully.  Mrs.  Wiscott  had  a 
wide  and  winning  way  with  children,  and  she  was  to  capture 
their  young  hearts  from  the  outset  and  lead  them  to  the 
church.  Mary,  whom  Lady  Charlotte  regarded  as  doubt- 
fully friendly,  was  to  be  detached  by  Unwin  and  got  away 
for  a  talk.  At  the  church  would  be  the  curate  and  the 
organist  and  the  sexton  and  his  daughter  and  Cashel,  the 
butler,  a  very  fine  type  of  the  more  serious  variety  of 
Anglican  butlers,  slender  and  very  active  and  earnest  and 
a  teetotaler.  And  to  the  children  it  would  all  seem  like  a 
little  game. 

Mr.  Wiscott  had  been  in  some  doubt  about  the  ceremony. 
He  had  baptized  infants,  he  had  baptized  "those  of  riper 
years,"  but  he  had  never  yet  had  to  deal  with  children  of 
four  or  five.  The  rubric  provides  that  for  such  the  form  for 
the  Public  Baptism  of  Infants  is  available  with  the  change  of 
the  word  "infant"  to  "child"  where  occasion  requires  it,  but 
the  rubric  says  nothing  of  the  handling  of  the  children 
concerned.  He  consulted  Lady  Charlotte.  Should  he  lift 
up  Peter  and  Joan  in  succession  to  the  font  when  the  mo- 
ment of  the  actual  sprinkling  came,  or  should  he  deal  with 
them  as  if  they  were  adults?  Lady  Charlotte  decided  that 
he  had  better  lift.  "They  are  only  little  mites,"  said  Lady 
Charlotte. 

Now  up  to  that  point  the  ceremony  went  marvellously  ac- 
cording to  plan.  It  is  true  that  Mary  wasn't  quite  got  out 
of  the  way;  she  was  obliged  to  follow  at  a  distance  because 
the  children  in  spite  of  every  hospitality  would  every  now 


THE  CHRISTENING  97 

and  then  look  round  for  her  to  nod  reassuringly  to  them; 
but  when  she  saw  the  rest  of  the  party  going  into  the  little 
church  she  shied  away  with  the  instinctive  avoidance  of  the 
reluctant  church  woman,  and  remained  remotely  visible 
through  the  open  doorway  afar  off  in  the  rhododendron  walk 
conversing  deeply  with  Unwin.  They  were  conversing  about 
the  unreasonableness  of  Unwin 's  sister-in-law  in  not  minding 
what  she  ate  in  spite  of  her  indigestion. 

The  children,  poor  little  heathens!  had  never  been  in 
church  before  and  everything  was  a  wonder.  They  saw  a 
gentleman  standing  in  the  midst  of  the  church  and  clad  in 
a  manner  strange  to  them,  in  a  surplice  and  cassock,  and 
under  it  you  saw  his  trousers  and  boots — it  was  as  if  he 
wore  night  clothes  over  his  day  clothes — and  immediately 
he  began  to  read  very  fast  but  yet  in  a  strangely  impressive 
manner  out  of  a  book.  They  had  great  confidence  now  in 
Mrs.  Wiscott,  and  accompanied  her  into  a  pew  and  sat  up 
neatly  on  hassocks  beside  her.  The  gentleman  in  the  white 
robe  kept  on  reading,  and  every  now  and  then  the  others,  who 
had  also  got  hold  of  books,  answered  him.  At  first  Peter 
wanted  to  laugh,  then  he  got  very  solemn,  and  then  he  began 
to  want  to  answer  too:  "wow  wow  wow,"  when  the  others 
did.  But  he  knew  he  had  best  do  it  very  softly.  There 
was  reverence  in  the  air.  Then  everybody  got  up  and  went 
and  stood,  and  Mrs.  Wiscott  made  Joan  and  Peter  stand, 
round  about  the  font.  She  stood  close  beside  Joan  and 
Peter  with  her  hands  very  reassuringly  behind  them.  From 
this  point  Peter  could  see  the  curate's  Adam's  apple  mov- 
ing in  a  very  fascinating  way.  So  things  went  on  quite 
successfully  until  the  fatal  moment  when  Mr.  Wiscott  took 
Peter  up  in  his  arms. 

"Come  along,"  he  said  very  pleasantly — not  realizing  that 
Peter  did  not  like  his  Adam's  apple. 

"He's  going  to  show  you  the  pretty  water,"  said  Mrs.  Wis- 
cott. 

"Xaw!"  said  Peter  sharply  and  backed  as  the  curate 
gripped  his  arm,  and  then  everything  seemed  to  go  wrong. 

Mr.  Wiscott  had  never  handled  a  sturdy  little  boy  of  five 
before.  Peter  would  have  got  away  if  Mrs.  Wiscott,  abandon- 
ing Joan,  had  not  picked  him  up  and  handed  him  neatly  to 


98  JOAN  AND  PETER 

her  husband.  Then  came  a  breathless  struggle  on  the  edge 
of  the  font,  and  upon  every  one,  even  upon  Lady  Charlotte, 
came  a  strange  sense  as  though  they  were  engaged  in  some 
deed  of  darkness.  The  water  splashed  loudly.  It  splashed 
on  Peter's  face  and  Peter's  abundant  voice  sent  out  its 
S.  O.  S.  call:"Mare-ii>i7" 

Mr.  Wiscott  compressed  his  lips  and  held  Peter  firmly, 
hushing  resolutely,  and  presently  struggled  on  above  a  tre- 
mendous din  towards  the  sign  of  the  cross.  .  .  . 

But  Joan  had  formed  her  own  rash  judgments. 

She  bolted  down  the  aisle  and  out  through  the  open  door, 
and  her  voice  filled  the  universe.  "They  dwounding  Petah. 
They  dwounding  Petah — like  they  did  the  kittays ! ' ' 

Far  away  was  Mary,  but  turning  towards  her  amazed. 

Joan  rushed  headlong  to  her  for  sanctuary,  wild  with 
terror. 

"I  wanna  be  kep,  Marewi,"  she  bawled.  "I  wanna  be 
kep!" 

§  8 

But  here  Mary  was  to  astonish  Lady  Charlotte.  "Why 
couldn't  they  tell  mef"  she  asked  Unwin  when  she  grasped 
the  situation. 

"It's  all  right,  Joan,"  she  said.  "Nobody  ain't  killing 
Peter.  You  come  alongo  me  and  see." 

And  it  was  Mary  who  stilled  the  hideous  bawling  of 
Peter,  and  Mary  who  induced  Joan  to  brave  the  horrors  of 
this  great  experience  and  to  desist  from  her  reiterated  as- 
sertion: "Done  wan'  nergenelman  t'wash  me!" 

And  it  was  Mary  who  said  in  the  carriage  going  back: 

"Don't  you  say  nothing  about  being  naughty  to  yer  Aunt 
Phyllis  and  I  won't  neether." 

And  so  she  did  her  best  to  avoid  any  further  discussion  of 
the  matter. 

But  in  this  pacific  intention  she  was  thwarted  by  Lady 
Charlotte,  who  presently  drove  over  to  The  Ingle-Nook  to 
see  her  "two  little  Christians"  and  how  Aunt  Pho?be  was 
taking  it.  She  had  the  pleasure  of  explaining  what  had  hap- 
pened herself. 


99 

"We  had  them  christened,"  she  said.  "It  all  passed  off 
very  well." 

"It  is  an  outrage,"  cried  Aunt  Phoebe,  "on  my  brother's 
memory.  It  must  be  undone." 

' '  That  I  fear  can  never  be, ' '  said  Lady  Charlotte  serenely, 
folding  her  hands  before  her  and  smiling  loftily. 

"Their  Little  White  Souls!"  exclaimed  Aunt  Phoebe,  and 
then  seizing  a  weapon  from  the  enemy's  armoury:  "7  shall 
write  to  our  solicitor." 

§  9 

Even  Lady  Charlotte  quailed  a  little  before  a  strange 
solicitor ;  she  knew  that  even  Grimes  held  the  secret  of  many 
tremendous  powers;  and  when  Mr.  Sycamore  introduced 
himself  as  having  "had  the  pleasure  of  meeting  your  nephew, 
Mr.  Oswald  Sydeuham,  on  one  or  two  occasions,"  she  pre- 
pared to  be  civil,  wary,  and  evasive  to  the  best  of  her  ability. 
Mr.  Sycamore  was  a  very  good-looking,  rosy  little  man  with 
silvery  hair,  twinkling  gold  spectacles,  a  soft  voice  and  a 
manner  of  imperturbable  urbanity.  "I  felt  sure  your  lady- 
ship would  be  willing  to  talk  about  this  little  business,"  he 
said.  "So  often  a  little  explanation  between  reasonable 
people  prevents,  oh!  the  most  disagreeable  experiences. 
Nowadays  when  courts  are  so  very  prone  to  stand  upon  their 
dignity  and  inflict  quite  excessive  penalties  upon  infractions 
— such  as  this. ' ' 

Lady  Charlotte  said  she  was  quite  prepared  to  defend  all 
that  she  had  done — anywhere. 

Mr.  Sycamore  hoped  she  would  never  be  put  to  that  in- 
convenience. He  did  not  wish  to  discuss  the  legal  aspects 
of  the  case  at  all,  still — there  was  such  a  thing  as  Contempt. 
He  thought  that  Lady  Charlotte  would  understand  that  al- 
ready she  had  gone  rather  far. 

"Mr.  Sycamore,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  heavily  and  im- 
pressively, "at  the  present  time  I  am  ill,  seriously  ill.  I 
ought  to  have  been  at  Bordighera  a  month  ago.  But  law  or 
no  law  I  could  not  think  of  those  poor  innocent  children  re- 
maining uubaptized.  I  stayed — to  do  my  duty." 

"I  doubt  if  any  court  would  sustain  the  plea  that  it  was 


100  JOAN  AND  PETER 

your  duty,  single-handed,  without  authorization,  in  defiance 
it  is  alleged  of  the  expressed  wishes  of  the  parents. ' ' 

'  *  But  you,  Mr.  Sycamore,  know  that  it  was  my  duty. ' ' 

"That  depends,  Lady  Charlotte,  on  one's  opinions  upon 
the  efficacy  of  infant  baptism.  Opinions,  you  know,  vary 
widely.  I  have  read  very  few  books  upon  the  subject,  and 
what  I  have  read  confused  me  rather  than  otherwise." 

And  Mr.  Sycamore  put  his  hands  together  before  him  and 
sat  with  his  head  a  little  on  one  side  regarding  Lady  Char- 
lotte attentively  through  the  gold-rimmed  spectacles. 

"Well,  anyhow  you  wouldn't  let  children  grow  up  so- 
cialists and  secularists  without  some  attempt  to  prevent  it ! " 

"Within  the  law,"  said  Mr.  Sycamore  gently,  and  coughed 
behind  his  hand  and  continued  to  beam  through  his 
glasses.  .  .  . 

They  talked  in  this  entirely  inconsecutive  way  for  some 
time  with  a  tremendous  air  of  discussing  things  deeply. 
Lady  Charlotte  expressed  a  great  number  of  opinions  very 
forcibly,  and  Mr.  Sycamore  listened  with  the  manner  of  a 
man  who  had  at  last  after  many  years  of  intellectual  desti- 
tution met  a  profoundly  interesting  talker.  Only  now  and 
then  did  he  seem  to  question  her  view.  But  yet  he  suc- 
ceeded in  betraying  a  genuine  anxiety  about  the  possible 
penalties  that  might  fall  upon  Lady  Charlotte.  Presently, 
she  never  knew  quite  how,  she  found  herself  accusing  Joan 
of  her  illegitimacy. 

"But  my  dear  Lady  Charlotte,  the  poor  child  is  scarcely 
responsible. ' ' 

"If  we  made  no  penalties  on  account  of  illegitimacy  the 
whole  world  would  dissolve  away  in  immorality." 

Mr.  Sycamore  looked  quite  arch.  "My  dear  lady,  surely 
there  would  be  one  or  two  exceptions!"  .  .  . 

Finally,  with  a  tremendous  effect  of  having  really  got 
to  the  bottom  of  the  matter,  he  said:  "Then  I  conclude. 
Lady  Charlotte,  that  now  that  the  children  are  baptized 
and  their  spiritual  welfare  is  assured,  all  you  wish  is  for 
things  to  go  on  quietly  and  smoothly  without  the  Miss 
Stublands  annoying  you  further." 

"Exactly,"  said  Lady  Charlotte.  "My  one  desire  is  to 
go  abroad — now  that  my  task  is  done." 


THE  CHRISTENING  101 

"You  have  every  reason  to  be  satisfied,  Lady  Charlotte, 
with  things  as  they  are.  I  take  it  that  what  I  have  to  do 
now  is  to  talk  over  the  Miss  Stublands  and  prevent  any 
vindictive  litigation  arising  out  of  the  informality  of  your 
proceedings.  I  think — yes,  I  think  and  hope  that  I  can  do 
it." 

And  this  being  agreed  upon  Mr.  Sycamore  lunched  com- 
fortably and  departed  to  The  Ingle-Xook,  where  he  showed 
the  same  receptive  intelligence  to  Aunt  Phoebe.  There  was 
the  same  air  of  taking  soundings  in  the  deep  places  of  opin- 
ion. 

"I  understand,"  he  said  at  last,  "that  your  one  desire  is 
to  be  free  from  further  raids  and  invasions  from  Lady 
Charlotte.  I  can  quite  understand  it.  Practically  she  will 
agree  to  that.  I  can  secure  that.  I  think  I  can  induce  her 
to  waive  what  she  considers  to  be  her  rights.  You  can't 
unbaptize  the  children,  but  I  should  think  that  under  your 
care  the  effect,  whatever  the  effect  may  be,  can  be  trusted 
to  wear  off.  ..." 

And  having  secured  a  similar  promise  of  inaction  from  the 
Miss  Stublands,  Mr.  Sycamore  returned  to  London,  twinkling 
pleasantly  about  the  spectacles  as  he  speculated  exactly  what 
it  was  that  he  had  so  evidently  quite  satisfactorily  settled. 


CHAPTER  THE  SIXTH 

THE  FOUKTH   GUARDIAN 

§   1 

IT  was  just  a  quarter  of  a  year  after  the  death  of  Dolly 
and  Arthur   before   Oswald   Sydenham  heard   of   the 
event  and  of  Arthur's  will  and  of  the  disputes  of  his 
three  fellow  guardians  in  England.     For  when  the  stone- 
mason boatman  staggered  and  fell  and  the  boat  turned  over 
beneath  the  Arco  Naturale,  Oswald  was  already  marching 
with  a  long  string  of  porters  and  armed  men  beyond  the 
reach  of  letters  and  telegrams  into  the  wilderness. 

He  was  in  pursuit  of  a  detachment  of  the  Sudanese  muti- 
neers who,  with  a  following  of  wives,  children  and  captives, 
were  making  their  way  round  through  the  wet  forest  country 
north  of  Lake  Kioga  towards  the  Nile  province.  "With  Syd- 
enham was  an  able  young  subaltern,  Muir,  the  only  other 
white  man  of  the  party.  In  that  net  of  rivers,  marsh  and  for- 
est they  were  destined  to  spend  some  feverish  months.  They 
pushed  too  far  eastward  and  went  too  fast,  and  they  found 
themselves  presently  not  the  pursuers  but  the  pursued,  cut  off 
from  their  supports  to  the  south.  They  built  a  stockade  near 
Lake  Salisbury,  and  were  loosely  besieged.  For  a  time 
both  sides  in  the  conflict  were  regarded  with  an  impartial 
unfriendliness  by  the  naked  blacks  who  then  cultivated  that 
primitive  region,  and  it  was  only  the  looting  and  violence  of 
the  Sudanese  that  finally  turned  the  scale  in  favour  of 
Sydenham 's  little  force.  Sydenham  was  able  to  attack  in 
his  turn  with  the  help  of  a  local  levy;  he  took  the  Sudanese 
camp,  killed  twenty  or  thirty  of  the  mutineers,  captured 
most  of  their  women  and  gear,  and  made  five  prisoners  with 
very  little  loss  to  his  own  party.  He  led  the  attack,  a  tall, 
lean,  dreadful  figure  with  half  a  face  that  stared  fiercely 
and  half  a  red,  tight-skinned,  blind  magk.  Two  Sudanese 

102 


THE  FOURTH  GUARDIAN  103 

upon  whom  his  one-sided  visage  came  suddenly,  yelled  with 
dismay,  dropped  their  rifles  and  started  a  stampede.  Black 
men  they  knew  and  white  men,  but  this  was  a  horrible  red 
and  white  man.  A  remnant  of  the  enemy  got  away  to  the 
north  and  eluded  his  pursuit  until  it  became  dangerous  to 
push  on  further.  They  were  getting  towards  the  district  in 
which  was  the  rebel  chief  Kabarega,  and  a  union  of  his  forces 
with  the  Sudanese  fugitives  would  have  been  more  than 
Sydenham  and  Muir  could  have  tackled. 

The  government  force  turned  southward  again.  Oswald 
had  been  suffering  from  fatigue  and  a  recurrence  of  black- 
water  fever,  a  short,  sharp  spell  that  passed  off  as  suddenly 
as  it  came ;  but  it  left  him  weak  and  nervously  shaken ;  for 
some  painful  days  before  he  gave  in  he  ruled  his  force 
with  an  iron  discipline  that  was  at  once  irrational  and  terri- 
fying, and  afterwards  he  was  carried  in  a  litter,  and  Muir 
took  over  the  details  of  command.  It  was  only  when  Oswald 
was  within  two  days'  journey  of  Luba  Fort  upon  Lake  Vic- 
toria Nyanza  that  his  letters  reached  him. 

§  2 

During  all  this  time  until  he  heard  of  Dolly's  death,  Os- 
wald's heart  was  bitter  against  her  and  womankind.  He  had 
left  England  in  a  fever  of  thwarted  loneliness.  He  did  his 
best  to  "go  to  Hell"  even  as  he  had  vowed  in  the  first 
ecstasy  of  rage,  humiliation  and  loss.  He  found  himself 
incapable  of  a  self -destructive  depravity.  He  tried  drinking 
heavily  and  he  could  never  be  sure  that  he  was  completely 
drunk;  some  toughness  in  his  fibre  defeated  this  overrated 
consolation.  He  attempted  other  forms  of  dissipation,  and 
he  could  not  even  achieve  remorse,  nothing  but  exasperation 
with  that  fiddling  pettiness  of  sexual  misbehaviour  which  we 
call  Vice.  He  desired  a  gigantic  sense  of  desolation  and 
black  damnation,  and  he  got  only  shame  for  a  sort  of  child- 
ish nastiness.  ' '  If  this  is  Sin ! ' '  cried  Oswald  at  last,  ' '  then 
God  help  the  Devil!" 

"There's  nothing  like  "Work,"  said  Oswald,  "nothing  like 
Work  for  forgetfulness.  And  getting  hurt.  And  being  shot 
at.  I  've  done  with  this  sort  of  thing  for  good  and  all. 


104  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"What  a  fool  I  was  to  come  here!  ..." 

And  he  went  on  his  way  to  Uganda. 

The  toil  of  his  expedition  kept  his  mind  from  any  clear 
thinking  about  Dolly.  But  if  he  thought  little  he  felt 
much.  His  mind  stuck  and  raged  at  one  intolerable  thought, 
and  could  not  get  beyond  it.  Dolly  had  come  towards  him 
and  then  had  broken  faith  with  the  promise  in  her  eyes,  and 
fled  back  to  Arthur's  arms.  And  now  she  was  with  Arthur. 
Arthur  was  with  her,  Arthur  had  got  her.  And  it  was  in- 
tolerably stupid  of  her.  And  yet  she  wasn't  stupid.  There 
she  was  in  that  affected  little  white  cottage  with  its  idiotic 
big  roof,  waiting  about  while  that  fool  punched  copper  or 
tenored  about  aesthetics.  (Oswald's  objection  to  copper  re- 
pousse had  long  since  passed  the  limits  of  sanity.)  Always 
Dolly  was  at  Arthur's  command  now.  Until  the  end  of 
things.  And  she  might  be  here  beside  her  mate,  with  the 
flash  in  her  eyes,  with  her  invincible  spirit,  sharing  danger, 
fever  and  achievement;  empire  building,  mankind  sav- 
ing. .  .  . 

Now  and  then  indeed  his  mind  generalized  his  bitter  per- 
sonal disappointment  with  a  fine  air  of  getting  beyond  it. 
The  Blantyre  woman  and  that  older  woman  of  his  first 
experiences  who  had  screamed  at  the  sight  of  his  disfigured 
face,  were  then  brought  into  the  case  to  establish  a  universal 
misogyny.  Women  were  just  things  of  sex,  child-bearers, 
dressed  up  to  look  like  human  beings.  They  promised  com- 
panionship as  the  bait  on  the  hook  promises  food.  They 
were  the  cheap  lures  of  that  reproductive  maniac,  herself 
feminine,  old  Mother  Nature;  sham  souls  blind  to  their  own 
worthless  quality  through  an  inordinate  vanity  and  self-im- 
portance. Ruthless  they  were  in  their  distribution  of 
disappointment.  Sterile  themselves,  life  nested  in  them. 
They  were  the  crowning  torment  in  the  Martyrdom  of 
Man. 

Thus  Oswald  in  the  moments  when  thought  overtook  him. 
And  when  it  came  to  any  dispute  about  women  among  the 
men,  and  particularly  to  the  disposal  of  the  women  after 
the  defeat  of  the  mutineers  near  Lake  Salisbury,  it  suited  his 
humour  to  treat  them  as  chattels  and  to  note  how  ready  they 
were  to  be  treated  as  chattels,  how  easy  in  the  transfer  of 


THE  FOURTH  GUARDIAN  105 

their  affections  and  services  from  their  defeated  masters  to 
their  new  owners.  This,  he  said,  was  the  natural  way  with 
women.  In  Europe  life  was  artificial ;  women  were  out  of 
hand;  we  were  making  an  inferior  into  a  superior  as  the 
Egyptian  made  a  god  of  the  cat.  Like  cat  worship  it  was  a 
phase  in  development  that  would  pass  in  its  turn. 

The  camp  at  which  his  letters  met  him  was  in  the  Busoga 
country,  and  all  day  long  the  expedition  had  been  tramping 
between  high  banks  of  big-leaved  plants,  blue  flowering 
salvias,  dracenas  and  the  like,  and  under  huge  flowering  trees. 
Captain  Wilkinson  from  Luba  Fort  had  sent  runners  and 
porters  to  meet  them,  and  at  the  halting-place,  an  open  space 
near  the  banana  fields  of  a  village,  they  found  tea  already  set 
for  them.  Oswald  was  ill  and  tired,  and  Muir  took  over  the 
bothers  of  supervision  while  Oswald  sat  in  a  deck  chair, 
drank  tea,  and  opened  his  letters.  The  first  that  came  to 
hand  was  from  Sycamore,  the  Stubland  solicitor.  Its  news 
astonished  him. 

Dear  Sir,  wrote  Mr.  Sycamore. 

I  regret  to  have  to  inform  you  of  the  death  of  my  two 
clients,  your  friend-s  Mr,  and  Mrs.  Arthur  Stubland.  They 
were  drowned  by  a  boat  accident  at  Capri  on  the  third  of 
this  month,  and  they  probably  died  within  a  few  minutes  of 
each  other.  They  had  been  in  Italy  upon  a  walking  tour 
together.  There  were  no  witnesses  of  the  accident — the  boat- 
man was  drowned  with  them — and  the  presumption  in  such 
cases  is  that  the  husband  survived  the  wife.  This  is  impor- 
tant because  by  the  will  of  Mrs.  Stubland  you  are  nomi- 
nated as  the  sole  guardian  both  of  the  son  and  the  adopted 
daughter,  while  by  the  will  of  Mr.  Stubland  you  are  one  of 
four  such  guardians.  In  all  other  respects  the  wills  are  in 
identical  terms.  .  .  . 

At  this  point  Oswald  ceased  to  read. 

He  was  realizing  that  these  words  meant  that  Dolly  was 
dead. 

§  3 

Oswald  felt  very  little  grief  at  the  first  instant  of  this 
realization.  We  grieve  acutely  for  what  we  have  lost, 


106  JOAN  AND  PETER 

whether  it  be  a  reality  or  a  dream,  but  Dolly  had  become 
for  Oswald  neither  a  possession  nor  a  hope.  In  his  mind 
she  was  established  as  an  intense  quarrel.  Whatever  he  had 
to  learn  about  her  further  had  necessarily  to  begin  in  terms 
of  that.  The  first  blow  of  this  news  made  him  furious.  He 
could  not  think  of  any  act  or  happening  of  Dolly 's  except  in 
terms  of  it  being1  aimed  at  him.  And  he  was  irrationally 
angry  with  her  for  dying  in  such  a  way.  That  she  had  gone 
back  to  Arthur  and  resumed  his  embraces  was,  he  felt,  bad 
enough;  but  that  she  should  start  out  to  travel  with  Arthur 
alone,  to  walk  by  Arthur's  side  exactly  as  Oswald  had  desired 
her  to  walk  by  his  side — he  had  dreamt  of  her  radiant  com- 
panionship, it  had  seemed  within  his  grasp — and  at  last  to 
get  drowned  with  Arthur,  that  was  the  thing  to  strike  him 
tirst.  He  did  not  read  the  rest  of  the  letter  attentively.  He 
threw  it  down  on  the  folding  table  before  him  and  hit  it  with 
his  fist,  and  gave  his  soul  up  to  a  storm  of  rage  and  jealousy. 

"To  let  that  fool  drown  here !"  he  cried.  "She'd  do  any- 
thing for  him.  .  .  . 

"And  I  might  go  to  Hell!  .  .  . 

"Oh,  damn  all  women!  ..." 

It  was  not  a  pretty  way  of  taking  this  blow.  But  such 
are  the  instinctive  emotions  of  the  thwarted  male.  His  first 
reception  of  the  news  of  Dolly's  death  was  to  curse  her 
and  all  her  sex.  .  .  . 

And  then  suddenly  he  had  a  gleam  of  imagination  and 
saw  Dolly  white  and  wet  and  pitiful.  Without  any  inter- 
mediate stage  his  mind  leapt  straight  from  storming  anger 
to  that.  .  .  . 

For  a  time  he  stared  at  that  vision — reproached  and 
stunned.  .  .  . 

Something  that  had  darkened  his  thoughts  was  dispelled. 
His  mind  was  illuminated  by  understanding.  He  saw  Dolly 
again  very  clearly  as  she  had  talked  to  him  in  the  garden.  It 
was  as  if  he  had  never  seen  her  before.  For  the  first  time  he 
realized  her  indecision.  He  understood  now  why  it  was  she 
had  snatched  herself  back  from  him  and  taken  what  she  knew 
would  be  an  irrevocable  step,  and  he  knew  now  that  it  was 
his  own  jealous  pride  that  had  made  that  step  irrevocable. 
The  Dolly  who  had  told  him  of  that  decision  next  morning 


THE  FOURTH  GUARDIAN  107 

was  a  Dolly  already  half  penitent  and  altogether  dismayed. 
And  if  indeed  he  had  loved  her  better  than  his  pride,  even 
then  he  might  have  held  on  still  and  won  her.  He  remem- 
bered how  she  had  winced  when  she  made  her  hinting  con- 
fession to  him.  No  proud,  cold-hearted  woman  had  she  been 
when  she  had  whispered,  "Oswald,  now  you  must  certainly 
go." 

It  was  as  plain  as  daylight,  and  never  before  had  he  seen 
it  plain. 

He  had  left  her,  weak  thing  that  she  was,  because  she  was 
weak,  for  this  fellow  to  waste  and  drown.  And  it  was  over 
now  and  irrevocable. 

''Men  and  women,  poor  fools  together,"  he  said.  "Poor 
fools.  Poor  fools,"  and  then  at  the  thought  of  Dolly,  broken 
and  shrinking,  ashamed  of  the  thing  she  had  done,  at  the 
thought  of  the  insults  he  had  slashed  at  her,  knowing  how 
much  she  was  ashamed  and  thinking  nevertheless  only  of  his 
own  indignity,  and  at  the  thought  of  how  all  this  was  now 
stilled  forever  in  death,  an  overwhelming  sense  of  the  pitiful- 
ness  of  human  pride  and  hatred,  passion  and  desire  came  upon 
him.  How  we  hated!  how  we  hurt  one  another!  and  how 
fate  mocked  all  our  spites  and  hopes !  God  sold  us  a  bargain 
in  life.  Dolly  was  sold.  Arthur  the  golden-crested  victor 
was  sold.  He  himself  was  sold.  The  story  had  ended  in  this 
pitiless  smacking  of  every  one  of  the  three  poor  tiresome 
bits  of  self-assertion  who  had  acted  in  it.  It  was  a  joke, 
really,  just  a  joke.  He  began  to  laugh  as  a  dog  barks,  and 
then  burst  into  bitter  weeping.  .  .  . 

He  wept  noisily  for  a  time.  He  blu-bbered  with  his 
elbows  on  the  table. 

His  Swahili  attendant  watched  him  with  an  undiminished 
respect,  for  Africa  weeps  and  laughs  freely  and  knows  well 
that  great  chiefs  also  may  weep. 

Presently  his  tears  gave  out;  he  became  very  still  and 
controlled,  feeling  as  if  in  all  his  life  he  would  never  weep 
again. 

He  took  up  Mr.  Sycamore's  letter  and  went  on  reading  it. 

"In  all  other  respects  the  wills  are  in  identical  terms," 
the  letter  ran.  "In  both  I  am  appointed  sole  executor,  a 


108  JOAN  AND  PETER 

confidence  I  appreciate  as  a  tribute  to  my  lifelong  friendship 
with  Mr.  Stubland  and  his  parents.  The  other  guardians 
are  Miss  Phyllis  and  Miss  Phoebe  Stubland  and  your  aunt- 
in-law,  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham." 

"Good  heavens!"  cried  Oswald  wearily,  as  one  hears  a 
hopelessly  weak  jest.  "But  whyf" 

"I  do  not  know  if  you  will  remember  me,  but  I  have  had 
the  pleasure  of  meeting  you  on  one  or  two  occasions,  notably 
after  your  admirable  paper  read  to  the  Royal  Geographical 
Society.  This  fact  and  the  opinion  our  chance  meetings  have 
enabled  me  to  form  of  you,  emboldens  me  to  add  something 
here  that  1  should  not  I  think  have  stated  to  a  perfect 
stranger,  and  that  is  my  impression  that  Mr.  Stubland  was 
particularly  anxious  that  you  should  become  a  guardian  un- 
der his  will.  1  knew  Mr.  Stubland  from  quite  a  little  boy; 
his  character  was  a  curious  one,  there  was  a  streak  of  distrust 
and  secretiveness  in  it,  due  I  think  to  a  Keltic  strain  that 
came  in  from  his  mother's  side.  He  altered  his  will  a  couple 
of  days  before  he  started  for  Italy,  and  from  his  manner  and 
from  the  fact  that  Mrs.  Stubland's  will  was  not  also  altered, 
I  conclude  that  he  did  so  without  consulting  her.  He  did  so 
because  for  some  reason  he  had  taken  it  into  his  head  that 
you  would  not  act,  and  he  did  so  for  no  other  reason  that  1 
can  fathom.  Otherwise  he  would  have  left  the  former  will 
alone.  Under  the  circumstances  1  feel  bound  to  tell  you  this 
because  it  .may  materially  affect  your  decision  to  undertake 
this  responsibility.  1  think  it  will  be  greatly  to  the  ad- 
vantage of  the  children  if  you  do.  1  may  add  that  1  know 
the  two  Miss  Stublands  as  well  as  I  knew  their  brother,  and 
that  I  have  a  certain  knowledge  of  Lady  Charlotte,  having 
been  consulted  on  one  occasion  by  a  client  in  relation  to  her. 
The  Misses  Stubland  were  taking  care  of  The  Ingle-Nook  and 
children — there  is  a  trustworthy  nurse — in  the  absence  of  the 
parents  up  to  the  time  of  the  parents'  decease,  and  it  will 
be  easy  to  prolong  this  convenient  arrangement  for  the  pres- 
ent. The  children  are  still  of  tender  age  and  for  the  next 
few  years  they  could  scarcely  be  better  off.  I  trust  that  in 
the  children's  interest  you  will  see  your  way  to  accept  this 
duty  to  your  friend.  My  hope  is  enhanced  by  the  thought 


THE  FOURTH  GUARDIAN  109 

that  so  I  may  ~be  able  later  io  meet  again  a  man  for  whose 
courage  and  abilities  and  achievements  I  have  a  very  great 
admiration  indeed. 

I  am,  dear  Sir, 

Very  truly  yours, 

George  Sycamore." 

"Yes,"  said  Oswald,  "but  I  can't,  you  know." 

He  turned  over  Sycamore's  letter  again,  and  it  seemed  no 
longer  a  jest  and  an  insult  that  Arthur  had  made  him  Peter's 
guardian.  Sycamore 's  phrases  did  somehow  convey  the  hesi- 
tating Arthur,  penitent  of  the  advantages  that  had  restored 
him  Dolly  and  still  fatuously  confident  of  Oswald's  good 
faith. 

"But  I  can't  do  it,  my  man,"  said  Oswald.  "It's  too 
much  for  human  nature.  Your  own  people  must  see  to  your 
own  breed. ' ' 

He  sat  quite  still  for  a  long  time  thinking  of  another  child 
that  now  could  never  be  born. 

' '  Why  didn  't  I  stick  to  her  ? "  he  whispered.  "Why  didn 't 
I  hold  out  for  her?" 

He  took  up  Sycamore's  letter  again. 

"But  why  the  devil  did  he  shove  in  old  Charlotte?"  he 
exclaimed.  "The  man  was  no  better  than  an  idiot.  And 
underhand  at  that." 

His  eye  went  to  a  pile  of  still  unopened  letters.  "Ah !  here 
we  are ! "  he  said,  selecting  one  in  a  bulky  stone-grey  envelope. 

He  opened  it  and  extracted  a  number  of  sheets  of  stone-grey 
paper  covered  with  a  vast,  loose  handwriting,  for  which 
previous  experience  had  given  Oswald  a  strong  distaste. 

My  dear  Nephew,  her  letter  began. 

/  suppose  you  have  already  heard  the  unhappy  end  of  that 
Stubland  marriage.  I  have  always  said  that  it  was  bound 
to  end  in  a  tragedy.  .  .  . 

"Oh  Lord!"  said  Oswald,  and  pitched  the  letter  aside  and 
fell  into  deep  thought.  .  .  . 

He  became  aware  of  Muir  standing  and  staring  down  at 
him.  One  of  the  boys  must  have  gone  off  to  Muir  and  told 
him  of  Oswald's  emotion. 


110  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Hullo,"  said  Muir.     "All  right?" 

"I've  been  crying,"  said  Oswald  drily.  "I've  had  bad 
news.  This  fever  leaves  one  rotten." 

' '  Old  Wilkinson  has  sent  us  up  a  bottle  of  champagne, ' '  said 
Muir.  ' '  He 's  thought  of  everything.  The  cook 's  got  curry 
powder  again  and  there 's  a  basket  of  fish.  We  shall  dine  to- 
night. It's  what  you  want." 

"Perhaps  it  is,"  said  Oswald. 

§  4 

After  dinner,  the  best  dinner  they  had  had  for  many  weeks, 
a  dinner  beautifully  suggestive  to  a  sick  man  of  getting 
back  once  more  to  a  world  in  which  there  is  enough  and  com- 
fort, Oswald 's  tongue  was  loosened  and  he  told  his  story.  He 
was  not  usually  a  communicative  man  but  this  was  a  brim- 
ming occasion ;  Muir  he  knew  for  a  model  of  discretion,  Muir 
had  been  his  colleague,  his  nurse  and  his  intimate  friend  to 
the  exclusion  of  all  others,  for  three  eventful  months,  and 
Muir  had  already  made  his  confidences.  So  Oswald  told 
about  Dolly  and  how  his  scar  and  his  scruples  had  come 
between  them,  and  what  he  thought  and  felt  about  Arthur, 
and  so  to  much  experimental  wisdom  about  love  and  the  bit- 
terness of  life.  He  mentioned  the  children,  and  presently 
Muir,  who  had  the  firm  conscientiousness  of  the  Scotch, 
brought  him  back  to  Peter. 

"He  was  a  decent  little  chap,"  said  Oswald.  "He  was 
tremendously  like  Dolly." 

"And  not  like  that  other  man?"  said  Muir  sympatheti- 
cally. 

"No.    Not  a  bit." 

"I'm  thinking  you  ought  to  stand  by  him  for  all  you're 
worth." 

Oswald  thought. 

"I  will,"  he  said.  .  .  . 

The  next  morning  life  did  not  seem  nearly  so  rounded 
and  kindly  as  it  had  been  after  his  emotional  storm  of  the 
evening  before;  he  was  angry  and  jealous  about  Dolly  and 
Arthur  again,  and  again  disposed  to  regard  his  guardianship 
as  an  imposition,  but  he  felt  he  had  given  his  word  over- 


THE  FOURTH  GUARDIAN  111 

night  and  that  he  was  bound  now  to  stand  by  Joan  and  Peter 
as  well  as  he  could.  Moreover  neither  Lady  Charlotte  nor 
the  sisters  Stubland  were  really,  he  thought,  people  to  whom 
children  should  be  entrusted.  His  party  reached  Luba's  the 
next  evening,  and  he  at  once  arranged  to  send  a  cable  to 
Mr.  Sycamore  accepting  his  responsibility  and  adding: 
"Prefer  children  should  go  on  as  much  as  possible  mother's 
ideas  until  my  return." 


CHAPTER  THE  SEVENTH 

THE  SCHOOL  OP  ST.   GEORGE   AND   THE  VENERABLE   BEDE 

§    1 

SO  for  a  time  this  contest  of  the  newer  England  of  free 
thought,  sentimental  socialism,  and  invested  profits 
(so  far  as  it  was  embodied  in  the  Stubland  sisters)  and 
the  traditional  land-owning,  church-going  Tory  England  (so 
far  that  is  as  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  was  able  to  repre- 
sent it),  for  the  upbringing  of  Joan  and  Peter  was  suspended, 
and  the  Stubland  sisters  remained  in  control  of  these  fortu- 
nate heirs  of  the  ages.  The  two  ladies  determined  to  make 
the  most  of  their  opportunity  to  train  the  children  to  be,  as 
Aunt  Phoebe  put  it,  "free  and  simple,  but  fearlessly  ad- 
vanced, unbiassed  and  yet  exquisitely  cultivated,  inheritors 
of  the  treasure  of  the  past  purged  of  all  ancient  defilement, 
sensuous,  passionate,  determined,  forerunners  of  a  super- 
humanity" — for  already  the  phrases  at  least  of  Nietzsche 
were  trickling  into  the  restricted  but  turbid  current  of  Brit- 
ish thought. 

In  their  design  the  Stubland  sisters  were  greatly  aided 
by  the  sudden  appearance  of  Miss  Murgatroyd  in  the  neigh- 
bourhood, and  the  rapid  and  emphatic  establishment  of  the 
School  of  Saint  George  and  the  Venerable  Bede  within  two 
miles  of  The  Ingle-Nook  door. 

Miss  Murgatroyd  was  a  sturdy,  rufous  lady  with  a  resent- 
ful manner,  as  though  she  felt  that  everything  and  every- 
body were  deliberately  getting  in  her  way,  and  an  effort  of 
tension  that  passed  very  readily  from  anger  to  enthusiasm 
and  from  enthusiasm  to  anger.  Her  place  was  in  the  van. 
She  did  not  mind  very  much  where  the  van  was  going  so 
long  as  she  was  in  it.  She  was  a  born  teacher,  too,  and  so 
overpoweringly  moved  to  teach  that  what  she  taught  was  a 

112 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      113 

secondary  consideration.  She  wanted  to  do  something  for 
mankind — it  hardly  mattered  what.  In  America  she  would 
have  been  altogether  advanced  and  new,  but  it  was  a  pecul- 
iarity of  middle-class  British  liberalism  at  the  end  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  just  as  it  was  of  middle-class  French  liberal- 
ism a  hundred  years  before,  that  it  was  strongly  reactionary 
in  colour.  In  the  place  of  Rousseau  and  his  demand  for  a 
return  to  the  age  of  innocence,  we  English  had  Ruskin  and 
Morris,  who  demanded  a  return  to  the  Middle  Ages.  And  in 
Miss  Murgatroyd  there  was  Rousseau  as  well  as  Ruskin ;  she 
wanted,  she  said,  the  best  of  everything;  she  was  very  com- 
prehensive; she  epitomized  the  movements  of  her  time. 

A  love  disappointment — the  man  had  fled  inexplicably  to 
the  ends  of  the  earth  and  vanished — had  exacerbated  in 
Miss  Murgatroyd  a  passion  for  the  plastic  affections  of  chil- 
dren; she  had  resolved  to  give  herself  wholly  to  the  creation 
of  a  new  sort  of  school  embodying  all  the  best  ideals  of  the 
time.  She  saw  herself  a  richly-robed,  creative  prophetess 
among  the  clustering  and  adoring  young. 

She  had  had  a  certain  amount  of  capital  available,  and 
this  she  had  expended  upon  the  adaptation  of  a  pleasant, 
many-roomed,  modern  house  that  looked  out  bravely  over 
the  valley  of  the  Weald  about  a  mile  and  three-quarters  from 
The  Ingle-Nook,  to  the  necessities  of  a  boarding-school,  and 
here  she  presently  accumulated  her  scholars.  She  furnished 
it  very  brightly  in  art  colours  and  Morris  patterns;  wher- 
ever possible  the  woodwork  was  stained  a  pleasing  green  and 
perforated  with  heart-shaped  holes;  there  were  big,  flat, 
obscurely  symbolical  colour-prints  by  Walter  Crane,  repro- 
ductions in  bright  colours  of  the  works  of  Rossetti  and 
Burne  Jones  and  Botticelli,  and  a  full-size  cast  of  the  Venus 
of  Milo.  The  name  \vas  Ruskinian  in  spirit  with  a  touch 
of  J.  R.  Green's  Short  History  of  the  English  People. 

Miss  Murgatroyd  was  indiscriminately  receptive  of  new 
educational  ideas;  she  meant  to  miss  nothing;  and  some  of 
these  ideas  were  quite  good  and  some  were  quite  silly;  and 
nearly  every  holiday  she  went  off  with  a  large  notebook  and 
much  enthusiasm  to  educational  congresses  and  conferences 
and  summer  schools  and  got  some  more.  One  that  she  ac- 
quired quite  early,  soon  after  the  battle  of  Omdurman,  was 


114  JOAN  AND  PETER 

to  put  all  her  girls  and  most  of  her  boys  into  Djibbahs — 
loose,  pretty  garments  that  were  imitated  from  and  named 
after  the  Dervish  form  of  shirt.  Hers  was  one  of  the  first  of 
those  numerous  "djibbah  schools"  that  still  flourish  in  Eng- 
land. 

Also  she  had  a  natural  proclivity  towards  bare  legs 'and 
sandals  and  hatlessness,  and  only  a  certain  respect  for  the 
parents  kept  the  school  from  waves  of  pure  vegetarianism. 
And  she  did  all  she  could  to  carry  her  classes  out  of  the 
classrooms  and  into  the  open  air.  .  .  . 

The  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  was  a  happy  and  beau- 
tiful time  for  the  bodies  of  the  children  of  the  more  prosper- 
ous classes.  Children  had  become  precious.  Among  such 
people  as  the  Stublands  one  never  heard  of  such  a  thing  as 
the  death  of  a  child ;  all  their  children  lived  and  grew  up. 
It  was  a  point  upon  which  Arthur  had  never  tired  of  insist- 
ing. Whenever  he  had  felt  bored  and  wanting  a  brief  holi- 
day he  had  been  accustomed  to  go  off  with  a  knapsack  to  study 
church  architecture,  and  he  had  never  failed  to  note  the  lists 
of  children  on  the  monuments.  "There  you  are  again," 
he  would  say.  "Look  at  that  one:  'and  of  Susan  his  wife 
by  whom  he  had  issue  eleven  children  of  whom  three  sur- 
vived him.'  That's  the  universal  story  of  a  woman's  life 
in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  century.  Nowadays  it 
would  read,  'by  whom  he  had  issue  three  children  who  all  sur- 
vived him.'  And  you  see  here,  she  died  first,  worn  out, 
and  he  married  again.  And  here  are  five  more  children,  and 
three  die  in  infancy  and  childhood.  There  was  a  frightful 
boom  in  dying  in  those  days ;  dying  was  a  career  in  itself  for 
two-thirds  of  the  children  born.  They  made  an  art  of  early 
death.  They  were  trained  to  die  in  an  edifying  manner. 
Parents  wrote  books  about  their  little  lost  saints.  Instead 
of  rearing  them '  .... 

Miss  Murgatroyd's  school  was  indeed  healthy  and  pretty 
and  full  of  physical  happiness,  but  the  teaching  and  mental 
training  that  went  on  in  it  was  of  a  lower  quality.  Mental 
strength  and  mental  balance  do  not  show  in  quite  the  same 
way  as  their  physical  equivalents.  Minds  do  not  grow  as 
bodies  do,  through  leaving  the  windows  open  and  singing  in 
the  sun. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      115 

§  2 

Aunt  Phcebe  was  an  old  acquaintance  of  Miss  Murgatroyd. 
They  had  met  at  Adelboden  during  one  of  the  early  Fabian 
excursions  in  Switzerland.  Afterwards  Miss  Murgatroyd 
had  been  charmed  by  Aunt  Phoebe's  first  book,  a  little  thin 
volume  of  bold  ideas  in  grey  covers  and  a  white  back,  called, 
By-thouyhts  of  a  Stitchwoman.  In  it  Aunt  Phoebe  repre- 
sented herself  rather  after  the  fashion  of  one  of  those  richly 
conceived  women  who  sit  and  stitch  in  the  background  of  Sir 
Frederick  Leighton's  great  wall  paintings  at  South  Kensing- 
ton, "The  Industrial  Arts  applied  to  Peace"  and  "The  In- 
dustrial Arts  Applied  to  War"  (her  needlework  was  really 
very  bad  indeed)  and  while  she  stitched  she  thought.  She 
thought  outrageously;  that  was  the  idea;  and  she  repre- 
sented all  the  quiet  stitching  sex  as  thinking  as  outrageously. 
Miss  Murgatroyd  had  a  kindred  craving  for  outrageous  think- 
ing, and  the  book  became  the  link  of  a  great  intellectual 
friendship.  They  vied  with  one  another  in  the  extremity  of 
their  opinions  and  the  mystical  extravagance  of  their  expres- 
sions. They  maintained  a  tumescent  flow  of  thought  that 
was  mostly  feeling  and  feeling  that  was  mostly  imitation,  far 
over  the  heads  of  the  nice  little  children,  who  ran  about  the 
bright  and  airy  school  premises  free  from  most  of  the  cur- 
rent infections  of  body  and  spirit,  and  grew  as  children  do 
grow  under  favourable  circumstances,  after  the  manner  of 
Nature  in  her  better  moods,  that  is  to  say  after  the  manner 
of  Nature  ploughed  and  weeded  and  given  light  and  air. 

So  far  as  Aunt  Phoebe  was  concerned,  the  great  thoughts 
were  confined  to  one  or  two  intimates  and — a  rather  hypo- 
thetical circle — her  readers.  Her  mental  galumphings  were 
a  thing  apart.  A  kind  of  shyness  prevented  her  with  strang- 
ers and  children.  But  Miss  Murgatroyd  was  impelled  by  a 
sense  of  duty  to  build  up  the  character  of  her  children  by 
discourse,  more  particularly  on  Sundays.  On  Sunday  morn- 
ings the  whole  school  went  to  church ;  in  the  afternoon  it  had 
a  decorous  walk,  or  it  read  or  talked,  and  Miss  Mills,  the 
junior  assistant,  read  aloud  to  the  little  ones;  in  the  evening 
it  read  or  it  drew  and  painted,  except  for  a  special  half 
hour  when  Miss  Murgatroyd  built  its  character  up.  That 


116  JOAN  AND  PETER 

was  her  time.  Thus,  for  example,  she  built  it  up  about 
Truth. 

"Girls,"  she  began,  "I  want  to  talk  to  you  a  little  this 
evening  about  Truth.  I  want  you  to  think  about  Truth,  to 
concentrate  your  minds  upon  it  and  see  just  all  it  means  and 
can  mean  to  us.  You  know  we  must  all  tell  the  Truth,  but 
has  it  ever  occurred  to  you  to  ask  why  we  must  tell  the 
Truth  ?  I  want  you  to  ask  that.  I  want  you  to  be  aware  of 
why  you  have  to  be  good  in  this  way  and  that.  I  do  not  want 
you  to  be  unthinkingly  good.  I  want  you  to  be 

'Not  like  dumb,  driven  cattle! 
Be  a  hero  in  the  strife!' 

or  a  heroine  as  the  case  may  be.  And  so,  why  do  we  tell 
the  Truth?  Is  it  because  if  we  did  not  do  so  people  would 
be  deceived  and  things  go  wrong?  Partly.  Is  it  because  if 
we  did  not  do  so,  people  would  not  trust  us?  Also  yes, 
partly.  But  the  real  reason,  girls  and  boys,  is  this,  the 
real  reason  is  that  Lying  Lips  are  an  Abomination  to  the 
Lord,  they  are  disgusting  to  Him,  and  so  they  ought  to  be 
disgusting  to  us.  That  is  the  real  reason  why  we  should  tell 
the  truth.  Because  it  is  a  thing  offensive  and  disgraceful, 
and  if  we  did  not  do  so,  then  we  should  tell  a  Lie. 

("Doris,  do  stop  plaiting  your  sister's  hair,  please. 
There  is  a  time  for  all  things.) 

"I  hope  there  is  no  one  here  who  can  bear  to  think  calmly 
of  telling  a  Lie ;  and  yet  every  time  you  do  not  tell  the  Truth 
manfully  and  bravely  you  do  that.  It  is  an  offence  so 
dreadful  that  we  are  told  in  Scripture  that  whosoever  call- 
eth  his  brother  a  liar — no  doubt  without  sufficient  evidence — 
is  in  danger  of  Hell  Fire.  I  hope  you  will  think  of  that  if 
ever  you  should  be  tempted  at  any  time  to  tell  a  Lie. 

"But  now  I  want  you  to  think  a  little  of  what  is  Truth. 
It  is  clear  you  cannot  tell  the  truth  unless  you  know  what 
truth  is.  Well,  what  is  truth?  One  thing,  I  think,  will 
occur  to  you  all  at  once  as  part  at  least  of  the  answer.  Truth 
is  straightness.  When  we  say  a  ruler  is  true  we  mean  that 
it  is  straight,  and  when  we  say  a  wall  or  a  corner  is  out 
of  truth  we  mean  that  it  isn't  straight.  And,  in  vulgar 
parlance,  when  we  say  a  man  is  a  straight  man  we  mean  one 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      117 

whose  acts  and  words  are  true.  And  another  thing  of  which 
our  great  teacher  Ruskin  so  often  reminds  us  is,  that  Truth 
is  Simplicity.  True  people  are  always  simple,  and  simple 
people  are  usually  too  simple  to  be  anything  but  true. 
Truth  never  explains.  It  never  argues.  When  I  have  to 
ask  a  girl — and  sometimes  I  have  to  ask  a  girl — did  she  or  did 
she  not  do  this  or  that,  then  if  she  answers  me  simply  and 
straightly  Yes  or  No,  I  feel  I  am  getting  the  truth,  but  if 
she  answers  back,  'that  depends,'  or  'Please,  Miss  Murga- 
troyd,  may  I  explain  just  how  it  was  ? '  then  I  know  that  there 
is  something  coming — something  else  coming,  and  not  the 
straight  and  simple,  the  homespun,  simple,  valiant  English 
Truth  at  all.  Yes  and  No  are  the  true  words,  because  as 
Plato  and  Aristotle  and  the  Greek  philosophers  generally 
taught  us  in  the  Science  of  Logic  long  ago,  and  taught  it  to 
us  for  all  time,  a  thing  either  is  or  else  it  is  not;  it  is  no 
good  explaining  or  trying  to  explain,  nothing  can  ever  alter 
that  now  for  ever.  Either  you  did  do  the  thing  or  you 
didn't  do  the  thing.  There  is  no  other  choice.  That  is  the 
very  essence  of  Logic;  it  would  be  impossible  to  have  Logic 
without  it."  .  .  . 

So  Miss  Murgatroyd  building  up  in  her  pupils'  minds  by 
precept  and  example,  the  wonderful  art  and  practice  of 
English  ratiocination. 

§  3 

At  first  Joan  and  Peter  did  not  see  very  much  of  Miss 
Murgatroyd.  She  moved  about  at  the  back  of  things,  very 
dignified  and  remote,  decorative  and  vaguely  terrible.  Their 
business  lay  chiefly  with  Miss  Mills. 

Miss  Mills  was  also  an  educational  enthusiast,  but  of  a 
milder,  gentler  type  than  Miss  Murgatroyd;  she  lacked 
Miss  Murgatroyd 's  confidence  and  boldness;  she  sometimes 
doubted  whether  everything  wasn't  almost  too  difficult  to 
teach.  She  was  no  blind  disciple  of  her  employer.  She  had 
a  suppressed  sense  of  academic  humour  that  she  had  ac- 
quired by  staying  with  an  aunt  who  kept  a  small  Berlin- 
wool  shop  in  Oxford,  and  once  or  twice  she  had  thought 
of  the  most  dreadful  witticisms  about  Miss  Murgatroyd. 


118  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Though  she  had  told  them  to  no  one,  they  had  kept  her  ears 
hot  for  days.  Often  she  wanted  quite  badly  to  titter  at  the 
school;  it  was  so  different  from  an  ordinary  school.  Yet 
she  liked  wearing  a  djibbah  and  sandals.  That  was  fun. 
She  had  no  educational  qualifications,  but  year  by  year  she 
was  slowly  taking  the  diploma  of  Associate  of  the  London 
College  of  Preceptors.  It  is  a  kindly  college;  the  examina- 
tions for  the  diploma  may  be  taken  subject  by  subject  over 
a  long  term  of  years.  She  used  to  enjoy  going  up  to  London 
for  her  diploma  at  Christmas  and  Midsummer.  Her  great 
difficulty  was  the  arithmetic.  The  sums  never  came  right. 

Miss  Murgatroyd  was  usually  very  severe  upon  what  she 
called  the  Fetish  of  Examinations;  she  herself  had  neither 
degree  nor  diploma,  it  was  a  moral  incapacity,  and  she  ad- 
mitted that  she  could  as  soon  steal  as  pass  an  examination; 
but  it  was  understood  that  Miss  Mills  pursued  this  qualifica- 
tion with  no  idea  whatever  of  passing  but  merely  "for  the 
sake  of  the  stimulus."  She  made  a  point  of  never  preparing 
at  all  ("cramming"  that  is)  for  any  of  the  papers  she 
"took."  This  put  the  thing  on  a  higher  level  altogether. 

She  had  already  done  the  Theory  and  Practice  of  Educa- 
tion part  of  the  diploma.  For  that  she  had  read  parts  of 
Leonard  and  Gertrude,  and  she  had  attended  five  lec- 
tures upon  Froebel.  Those  were  days  long  before  the  Mon- 
tessori  System,  which  is  now  so  popular  with  our  Miss 
Millses;  the  prevalent  educational  vogues  in  the  'nineties 
were  Kindergarten  and  Swedish  drill  (the  Ling  System). 
Miss  Mills  was  an  enthusiast  for  the  Kindergarten.  She 
began  teaching  Joan  and  Peter  queer  little  practices  with 
paper  mats  and  paper-pattern  folding,  and  the  stringing  of 
beads.  As  Joan  and  Peter  had  been  doing  such  things  for  a 
year  or  so  at  home  as  "play,"  their  ready  teachability  im- 
pressed her  very  favourably.  All  the  children  who  fell  un- 
der Miss  Mills  got  a  lot  of  Kindergarten,  even  though  some 
of  them  were  as  old  as  nine  or  ten.  They  had  lots  of  little 
songs  that  she  made  them  sing  with  appropriate  action.  All 
these  little  songs  dealt  with  the  familiar  daily  life — as  it 
was  lived  in  South  Germany  four  score  years  ago.  The  chil- 
dren pretended  to  be  shoemakers,  foresters,  and  woodcut- 
ters and  hunters  and  cowherds  and  masons  and  students 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      119 

wandering  about  the  country,  and  they  imitated  the  hammer- 
ing of  shoes,  the  sawing  of  stone  or  the  chopping  down  of 
trees,  and  so  forth.  It  had  never  dawned  upon  Miss  Mills 
that  such  types  as  these  were  rare  objects  upon  the  Surrey 
countryside.  In  the  country  about  her  there  were  no  ma- 
sons because  there  was  no  stone,  no  cowherds  because  there 
were  no  cows  on  the  hills  and  the  cows  below  grazed  in 
enclosed  fields,  trees  and  wood  were  handled  wholesale  by 
machinery,  and  people's  boots  came  from  Northampton  or 
America,  and  were  repaired  in  London.  If  any  one  had  sug- 
gested songs  about  golf  caddies,  jobbing  gardeners,  or  trac- 
tion-engines, or  steam-ploughs,  or  sawmills,  or  rate-collectors, 
or  grocers'  boys,  or  season-ticket  holders,  or  stockbrokers 
from  London  stealing  rights-of-way,  or  carpenters  putting 
up  fences  and  trespass-notice  boards,  she  would  have  thought 
it  a  very  vulgar  suggestion  indeed. 

Kindergarten  did  not  occupy  all  the  time-table  of  Miss 
Mills.  She  regarded  kindergarten  as  a  special  subject.  She 
also  taught  her  class  to  read,  she  taught  them  to  write,  she 
imparted  the  elements  of  history  and  geography,  she  did  not 
so  much  lay  the  foundations  of  mathematics  as  accumulate  a 
sort  of  rubble  on  which  Mr.  Beldame,  the  visiting  mathe- 
matical master  (Tuesdays  and  Thursdays),  was  afterwards 
to  build.  Here  again  Joan  and  Peter  were  fortunate. 
Peter  had  learnt  his  alphabet  before  he  was  two:  Joan  had 
not  been  much  later  with  it,  and  both  of  them  could  read 
easy  little  stories  already  before  they  came  under  Miss  Mills' 
guidance.  That  English  spelling  was  entirely  illogical,  had 
not  troubled  them  in  the  least.  Insistence  upon  logical 
consistency  comes  later  in  life.  Miss  Mills  never  discovered 
their  previous  knowledge.  She  had  heard  of  a  method  of 
teaching  to  read  which  was  called  the  "Look  and  Say 
Method,"  and  the  essence  of  it  was  that  you  never  learnt 
your  letters.  It  was  devised  for  the  use  of  those  older 
children  who  go  to  elementary  schools  from  illiterate  homes, 
and  who  are  beginning  to  think  for  themselves  a  little. 
From  the  first  by  this  method  the  pupils  learnt  the  letters 
in  combination. 

"Now,  Peter,"  Miss  Mills  would  say,  "this  is  'to.'  Look 
and  say — to." 


120 


JOAN  AND  PETER 


"To,"  said  Peter. 

"Now  I  put  this  little  squiggle  to  it." 

("P,"  said  Peter  privately). 

''And  it  is  'top'." 

"Top,  "said  Peter. 

"And  now  this  is  'co.'    "What  is  this?    Look  and  say." 

Peter  regarded  "cop"  for  a  moment.  He  knew  c-o-p  was 
the  signal  for  "cop,"  just  as  S.O.S.  is  the  signal  for  "help 
urgently  needed,"  but  he  knew  also  it  was  forbidden  to  read 
out  the  letters  of  the  signal. 

"Cop,"  said  Peter,  after  going  through  the  necessary 
process  of  thought. 

His  inmost  feeling  about  the  matter  was  that  Miss  Mills 
did  not  know  her  letters,  but  had  some  queer  roundabout 
way  of  reading  of  her  own,  and  that  he  was  taking  an  agree- 
able advantage  of  her.  .  .  . 

Then  Miss  Mills  taught  Peter  to  add  and  subtract  and 
multiply  and  divide.  She  had  once  heard  some  lectures 
upon  teaching  arithmetic  by  graphic  methods  that  had 
pleased  her  very  much.  They  had  seemed  so  clear.  The 
lecturer  had  suggested  that  for  a  time  easy  sums  might  be 
shown  in  the  concrete  as  well  as  in  figures.  You  would 
first  of  all  draw  your  operation  or  express  it  by  wood  blocks, 
and  then  you  would  present  it  in  figures.  You  would  draw 
an  addition  of  3  to  4,  thus : 


added  to 


makes  this  heap 


And  then  when  your  pupil  had  counted  it  and  verified  it 
you  would  write  it  down: 

3  +  4  7 

But  Miss  Mills,  when  she  made  her  notes,  had  had  no 
time  to  draw  all  the  parallelograms;  she  had  just  put  down 
one  and  a  number  over  it  in  each  case,  and  then  her  memory 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE 


121 


had   muddled  the   idea. 

thus 

you. 


So   she   taught   Joan   and  Peter 
"See,"  she  said,  "I  will  make  it  perfectly  plain  to 
Perfectly  plain.    You  take  three — so,"  and  she  drew 


'  and  then  you  take  four — so, ' '  and  she  drew 


"and  then  you  see  three   plus  four   makes  seven — so; 


"Do  you  see  now  how  it  must  be  so,  Peter?" 

Peter  tried  to  feel  that  he  did. 

Peter  quite  agreed  that  it  was  nice  to  draw  frames  about 
the  figures  in  this  way.  Afterwards  he  tried  a  variation 
that  looked  like  the  face  of  old  Chester  Drawers: 


But  for  some  reason  Miss  Mills  would  not  see  the  beauty  of 
that.  Instead  of  laughing,  she  said:  "Oh,  no,  that's  quite 
wrong!"  which  seemed  to  Peter  just  selfishly  insisting  on  her 
own  way. 

Well,  one  had  to  let  her  have  her  own  way.  She  was  a 
grown-up.  If  it  had  been  Joan,  Peter  would  have  had  his 
way.  .  .  . 

Both  Joan  and  Peter  were  much  addicted  to  drawing 
when  they  went  to  the  School  of  St.  George  and  the  Vener- 


122  JOAN  AND  PETER 

able  Bede.  They  had  picked  it  up  from  Dolly.  They  pro- 
duced sketches  that  were  something  between  a  scribble  and 
an  inspired  sketch.  They  drew  three-legged  horses  that 
really  kicked  and  men  who  really  struck  hard  with  arms 
longer  than  themselves,  terrific  blows.  If  Peter  wanted  to 
make  a  soldier  looking  very  fierce  in  profile,  he  drew  an 
extra  eye  aglare  beyond  the  tip  of  the  man's  nose.  If  Joan 
wanted  to  do  a  pussy-cat  curled  up,  she  curled  it  up  into 
long  spirals  like  a  snake.  Any  intelligent  person  could  be 
amused  by  the  sketches  of  Joan  and  Peter.  But  Miss  Mills 
discovered  they  were  all  "out  of  proportion,"  and  Miss 
Murgatroyd  said  that  this  sort  of  thing  was  "mere  scrib- 
bling." She  called  Peter's  attention  to  the  strong,  firm  out- 
lines of  various  drawings  by  Walter  Crane.  She  said  that 
what  the  hands  of  Joan  and  Peter  wanted  was  discipline. 
She  said  that  a  drawing  wasn't  a  drawing  until  it  was  "lined 
in."  She  set  the  two  children  drawing  pages  and  pages 
of  firm,  straight  lines.  She  related  a  wonderful  fable  of 
how  Giotto's  one  aim  in  life  was  to  draw  a  perfect  free- 
hand circle.  She  held  out  hopes  that  some  day  they  might 
draw  "from  models,"  cones  and  cubes  and  such-like  stirring 
objects.  But  she  did  not  think  they  would  ever  draw  well 
enough  to  draw  human  beings.  Neither  Miss  Mills  nor  Miss 
Murgatroyd  thought  it  was  possible  for  any  one,  not  being 
a  professional  artist,  to  draw  a  human  being  in  motion. 
They  knew  it  took  years  and  years  of  training.  Even  then 
it  was  very  exhausting  to  the  model.  They  thought  it  was 
impertinent  for  any  one  young  to  attempt  it. 

So  Joan  and  Peter  got  through  their  "drawing  lessons" 
by  being  as  inattentive  as  possible,  and  in  secret  they  prac- 
tised drawing  human  beings  as  a  vice,  as  something  for- 
bidden and  detrimental  and  delightful.  They  drew  them 
kicking  about  and  doing  all  sorts  of  things.  They  drew 
them  with  squinting  eyes  and  frightful  noses.  Sometimes 
they  would  sort  of  come  like  people  they  knew.  They  made 
each  other  laugh.  Peter  would  draw  nonsense  things  to 
amuse  the  older  girls.  When  he  found  difficulties  with  hands 
or  feet  or  horses'  legs  he  would  look  secretly  at  pictures  to 
see  how  they  were  done.  He  thought  it  was  wrong  to  do  this, 
but  he  did  it.  He  wanted  to  make  his  pictures  alive-er  and 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      123 

liker  every  time;  he  was  unscrupulous  how  he  did  it.  So 
gradually  the  two  children  became  caricaturists.  But  in 
their  school  reports  there  was  never  anything  about  their 
drawing  except  "Untidy,"  or,  in  the  case  of  Joan,  "Could 
do  better  if  she  would  try." 

Peter  was  rather  good  at  arithmetic,  in  spite  of  Miss 
Mills'  instruction.  He  got  sums  right.  It  was  held  to  be 
a  gift.  Joan  was  less  fortunate.  Like  most  people  who 
have  been  badly  taught,  Miss  Mills  had  one  or  two  foggy 
places  in  her  own  arithmetical  equipment.  She  was  not 
clear  about  seven  sevens  and  eight  eights;  she  had  a  con- 
fused, irregular  tendency  to  think  that  they  might  amount 
in  either  case  to  fifty-six,  and  also  she  had  a  trick  of  adding 
seven  to  nine  as  fifteen,  although  she  always  got  from  nine 
to  seven  correctly  as  sixteen.  Every  learner  of  arithmetic 
has  a  tendency  to  start  little  local  flaws  of  this  sort,  stand- 
ing sources  of  error,  and  every  good,  trained  teacher  looks  out 
for  them,  knows  how  to  test  for  them  and  set  them  right. 
Once  they  have  been  faced  in  a  clear-headed  way,  such 
flaws  can  be  cured  in  an  hour  or  so.  But  few  teachers  in 
upper  and  middle-class  schools  in  England,  in  those  days, 
knew  even  the  elements  of  their  business;  and  it  was  the 
custom  to  let  the  baffling  influence  of  such  flaws  develop 
into  the  persuasion  that  the  pupil  had  not  "the  gift  for 
mathematics."  Very  few  women  indeed  of  the  English 
"educated"  classes  to  this  day  can  understand  a  fraction 
or  do  an  ordinary  multiplication  sum.  They  think  compu- 
tation is  a  sort  of  fudging — in  which  some  people  are 
persistently  lucky  enough  to  guess  right — "the  gift  for 
mathematics" — or  impudent  enough  to  carry  their  points. 
That  was  Miss  Mills'  secret  and  unformulated  conviction,  a 
conviction  with  which  she  was  infecting  a  large  proportion  of 
the  youngsters  committed  to  her  care.  Joan  became  a  mathe- 
matical gambler  of  the  wildest  description.  But  there  was 
a  guiding  light  in  Peter's  little  head  that  made  him  grip 
at  last  upon  the  conviction  that  seven  sevens  make  always 
forty-nine,  and  eight  eights  always  sixty-four,  and  that 
when  this  haunting  fifty-six  flapped  about  in  the  sums  it 
was  because  Miss  Mills,  grown-up  teacher  though  she  was, 
was  wrong. 


124  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Mr.  Robert  Mond,  who  has  done  admirable  things  for 
the  organized  study  and  organized  rearing  of  infants,  once 
told  me  that  a  baby  was  the  hardest  thing  in  the  world  to 
kill.  If  it  were  not,  he  said,  there  would  be  no  grown-up 
people  at  all.  "But  a  lot,"  he  added,  "  get  their  digestions 
spoilt,  mind  you,  or  grow  up  rickety."  .  .  .  Still  harder  is 
it  to  kill  a  child's  intelligence.  There  is  something  heroic 
about  the  fight  that  every  infant  mind  has  to  make  against 
the  bad  explanations,  the  misleading  suggestions,  the  sheer 
foolishness  in  which  we  adults  entangle  it.  The  dawning 
intelligence  of  Peter,  like  a  young  Hercules,  fought  with  the 
serpentine  muddle-headedness  of  Miss  Mills  in  its  cradle,  and 
escaped — remarkably  undamaged.  .  .  .  Joan's,  too,  fought 
and  escaped,  except  perhaps  for  a  slight  serpentine  infec- 
tion. She  was  feminine  and  flexible;  she  lacked  a  certain 
brutality  of  conviction  that  Peter  possessed. 

§  4 

But  the  regular  teaching  was  the  least  important  thing  in 
the  life  of  the  School  of  St.  George  and  the  Venerable  Bede. 
It  existed  largely  in  order  to  be  put  on  one  side. 

Miss  Murgatroyd  had  the  temperament  of  a  sensational 
editor.  Her  school  was  a  vehicle  for  Booms.  Every  term 
there  was  at  least  one  fundamental  change. 

The  year  when  Joan  and  Peter  joined  the  school  was  the 
year  of  the  Diamond  Jubilee,  and  Miss  Murgatroyd  had  a 
season  of  loyalty.  The  "Empire"  and  a  remarkable  work 
called  Sixty  Years  a  Queen  dominated  the  school ;  Vic- 
toria, that  poor  little  old  panting  German  widow,  was  rep- 
resented as  building  up  a  great  fabric  of  liberty  and  order, 
as  reconciling  nations,  as  showing  what  a  woman's  heart,  a 
mother's  instinct,  could  do  for  mankind.  She  was,  Miss 
Murgatroyd  conveyed,  the  instigator  of  such  inventions  as 
the  electric  light  and  the  telephone ;  she  spread  railways 
over  the  world  as  one  spreads  bread  with  butter;  she  in- 
spired Tennyson  and  Dickens,  Carlyle  and  William  Morris 
to  their  remarkable  efforts.  The  whole  world  revered  her. 
All  this  glow  of  personal  loyalty  vanished  from  the  school 
before  the  year  was  out;  the  Queen  ceased  to  be  mentioned 
and  the  theme  of  Hand  Industry  replaced  her.  Everything 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      125 

was  to  be  taught  by  hand  and  no  books  were  to  be  used. 
Education  had  become  too  bookish.  "Rote  learning"  was 
forbidden  throughout  the  establishment  and  "text-books" 
were  to  be  replaced  by  simple  note-books  made  by  the  chil- 
dren themselves.  Then  two  bright  girls  came  to  the  school 
whose  father  was  French,  and,  by  a  happy  accident,  a  little 
boy  also  joined  up  who  had  been  very  well  trained  by  a 
French  governess.  All  three  spoke  French  extremely  well. 
Miss  Murgatroyd  was  inspired  to  put  the  school  French  on 
a  colloquial  footing,  and  the  time-table  was  reconstructed 
with  a  view  to  the  production  of  Le  Bourgeois  Gentilhomme 
on  St.  George's  Day,  the  anniversary  day  of  the  school. 

A  parent  who  could  paint  was  requisitioned  as  a  scene- 
painter,  the  stage  was  put  up  in  the  main  schoolroom, 
and  those  who  could  take  no  other  part  were  set  to  help  make 
the  costumes  and  distribute  programs  at  the  perform- 
ance. .  .  . 

These  things  happened  over  the  heads  of  Joan  and  Peter 
very  much  as  the  things  in  the  newspaper  used  to  happen 
over  our  heads  before  the  Great  War  got  hold  of  us.  They 
went  about  their  small  lives  amidst  these  things  and  with 
a  vast  indifference  to  all  such  things.  They  played  their 
little  parts  in  them — the  realities  of  life  were  not  there. 

To  begin  with,  Mary  'ised  to  take  them  to  school;  but 
after  a  year  and  a  half  of  that  it  occurred  to  Aunt  Phyllis 
that  it  would  cultivate  self-reliance  if  they  went  alone.  So 
Mary  only  went  to  fetch  them  when  there  was  need  of  an  um- 
brella or  some  such  serious  occasion.  The  path  ran  up 
through  the  bushes  to  the  high  road  past  the  fence  of 
Master's  paddock  where  Peter  had  once  covered  himself  with 
tar.  Then  they  had  to  go  along  the  high  road  with  a  pine- 
wood  to  the  right — a  winding  path  amidst  the  trees  ran 
parallel  to  the  road — and  presently  with  a  pine-wood  to 
the  left,  which  hid  the  hollow  in  which  the  parents  of 
young  Cuspard  had  made  their  abode  and  out  of  which 
young  Cuspard  would  sometimes  appear,  a  ginger-haired, 
hard-breathing  youngster,  bare-headed  and  bare-footed  and 
altogether  very  advanced,  and  so  to  the  little  common  where 
there  would  be  geese  or  a  tethered  pony.  Joan  and  Peter 
crossed  this  obliquely  by  the  path,  which  was  often  boggy 


126  JOAN  AND  PETER 

in  wet  weather,  and  went  along  by  the  Sheldrick's  holly 
hedge  to  the  open  crest  of  heather  from  which  one  could 
run  down  to  the  school.  One  could  see  the  playground  and 
games  going  on  long  before  one  could  get  down  to  them.  And 
if  it  were  not  too  stormy  the  school  flag  with  its  red  St. 
George  and  the  Dragon  on  white  would  be  flying.  There 
were  no  indications  of  the  Venerable  Bede  on  the  Flag, 
but  Joan  had  concluded  privately  that  he  was  represented 
by  the  red  knob  at  the  top  of  the  flagstaff.  For  a  year  and 
more  Joan  thought  that  the  Venerable  Bede  was  really  a 
large  old  bead  of  profound  mystical  significance. 

Joan  and  Peter  varied  with  the  seasons,  but  except  when 
Joan  wore  a  d.jibbah  they  were  dressed  almost  alike;  in 
high  summer  with  bare  legs  and  brown  smocks  and  Heidel- 
berg sandals,  and  in  winter  like  rolls  of  green  wool  stuck 
on  leather  gaiters.  When  they  grew  beyond  the  smock  stage, 
then  they  both  wore  art  green  blouses  with  the  school  em- 
blem of  St.  George  on  the  pockets,  but  Joan  wore  a  dark 
blue  gym  skirt  and  Peter  had  dark  blue  knickerbockers 
simply.  The  walk  altered  a  little  every  day.  Now  the  trees 
were  dark  and  the  brambles  by  the  roadside  wet  and  wilted, 
now  all  the  world  was  shooting  green  buds  except  for  the 
pines,  now  the  pines  were  taking  up  the  spring  brightness, 
now  all  the  world  was  hot  and  drsty  and  full  of  the  smell 
of  resin,  and  now  again  it  was  wet  and  misty  and  with  a 
thousand  sorts  of  brightly  coloured  fungus  among  the  pine 
stems.  Joan  and  Peter  learnt  by  experience  that  throwing 
pine-cones  hurts,  and  reserved  them  for  the  Cuspard  boy 
who  had  never  mastered  this  lesson.  Peter  started  a  "Moo- 
seum"  of  fungi  in  the  playroom,  and  made  a  great  display 
of  specimens  that  presently  dried  up  or  deliquesced  and 
stank.  When  the  snow  came  in  the  winter  the  Cuspard  boy 
waylaid  them  at  the  corner  with  a  prepared  heap  of  snow- 
balls and  fell  upon  them  with  shrieks  of  excitement,  throwing 
so  fast  and  wildly  and  playing  the  giddy  windmill  so  com- 
pletely that  it  was  quite  easy  for  Joan  and  Peter  to  close  in 
and  capture  his  heap.  Whereupon  he  fled  toward  the  school 
weeping  loudly  that  it  was  his  heap  and  refusing  to  be  com- 
forted. 

But  afterwards  all  three  of  them  made  common  cause 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE       127 

against  a  treacherous  ambuscade  behind  the  Sheldrick  holly 
hedge. 

It  was  on  these  journeyings  that  Joan  began  to  hear  first 
of  the  marvellous  adventures  of  Uncle  Nobby  and  Bungo 
Peter.  She  most  liked  Bungo  Peter  because  he  had  such  a 
satisfying  name ;  Peter  never  told  her  he  was  really  the 
newel  knob  at  home,  but  she  always  understood  him  to  be 
something  very  large  and  round  and  humorous  and  richly 
coloured.  Sometimes  he  was  as  big  as  the  world  and  some- 
times he  was  a  suitable  playmate  for  little  children.  He  was 
the  one  constant  link  in  a  wandering  interminable  Saga 
that  came  like  a  spider's  thread  endlessly  out  of  Peter's  busy 
brain.  It  was  a  story  of  quests  and  wanderings,  experiments 
and  tasks  and  feuds  and  wars;  Nobby  was  almost  always 
in  it,  kind  and  dreadfully  brave  and  always  having  narrow 
escapes  and  being  rescued  by  Bungo  Peter.  Daddy  and 
Mummy  came  in  and  went  out  again,  Peter  and  Joan  joined 
in.  For  a  time  Bungo  Peter  had  a  Wonderful  Cat  that 
would  have  shamed  Puss-in-boots.  Sometimes  the  story 
would  get  funny,  so  funny  that  the  two  children  would 
roll  along  the  road,  drunken  with  laughter.  As  for  example 
when  Bungo  Peter  had  hiccups  and  couldn't  say  anything 
else  whatever  you  asked  him. 

After  a  time  Joan  learned  the  trick  of  the  Saga  and  would 
go  on  with  it  in  her  own  mind  as  a  day-dream.  She  in- 
vented that  really  and  truly  Bungo  Peter  loved  her  des- 
perately and  that  she  loved  Bungo  Peter;  but  she  knew, 
though  she  knew  not  why  nor  wherefore,  that  this  was  a 
thing  Peter  must  never  be  told. 

Sometimes  she  would  try  to  cut  in  and  make  some  of  the 
saga  herself.  "Lemme  tell  you,  Petah,"  she  used  to  squeal. 
"You  just  lemme  tell  you."  But  it  was  a  rare  thing  for 
Peter  to  give  way  to  her;  sometimes  he  would  not  listen 
at  all  to  what  she  had  to  say  about  Bungo  Peter;  he  would 
smite  her  clown  with  "No,  he  didn't  do  nuffin  of  the  sort, 
not  reely,"  and  sometimes  when  she  had  thought  of  a  really 
good  thing  to  tell  about  him,  Peter  would  take  it  away  from 
her  and  go  on  telling  about  it  himself,  as  for  instance  when 
she  thought  of  "Lightning-slick,"  that  Bungo  Peter  used 
to  put  on  his  heels. 


128  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter  listened  to  her  poor  speeding-up  with  "Lightning- 
slick"  for  a  while. 

Then  he  said:     "And  after  that,  Joan,  after  that " 

"Oh!  lemme  go  on,  Petah.  Do  lemme  go  on.  The  fird 
time  he  was  runned  after  by  auyfing  it  was  this. ' ' 

"He  put  it  on  his  bicycle  wheels,"  said  Peter,  getting 
bored  by  her,  "instead  of  oil." 

"He  put  it  on  his  bicycle  wheels  instead  of  oil,"  said  Joan, 
accepting  the  idea,  "and  along  came  a  Tiger."  (She  had 
already  done  a  Mad  Dog  and  a  Bear.) 

But  after  that  Peter  took  over  altogether  while  she  was 
waving  about  rather  helplessly  and  breathlessly  with  "the 
Forf  time  Bungo  Peter  used  Lightning-slick,  the  forf 
time — "  and  hesitating  whether  to  make  it  a  snake  or  an 
elephant,  Peter  could  stand  it  no  longer. 

"But  you  don't  know  what  Bungo  Peter  did  the  Forf 
time,  Joan — you  don't  reely  and  I  do.  Bungo  Peter  told  me. 
Bungo  Peter  wanted  the  holidays  to  come,  so  Bungo  Peter 
went  and  put  Lightning-slick  on  the  axles  of  the  Erf." 

"What  good  was  that?" 

"It  went  fast.  It  went  faster  and  faster.  The  Erf.  It 
regular  spun  round.  And  the  sun  rose  and  the  sun  set  jest 
in  an  hour  or  so.  'Cos  it  would,  Joan.  It  would.  Yes,  it 
would.  There  wasn't  any  time  for  anyfing.  People  got  up 
and  had  their  breckfus — and  it  was  bedtime.  People  went 
out  for  walks  and  got  b'nighted.  Then  when  the  holidays 
came  Buugo  Peter  just  put  a  stick  in  the  place  and  stopped 
it  going  fast  any  more. ' ' 

"Put  a  stick  in  what  place?" 

"Where  the  Erf  goes  round.  And  then,  then  the  days 
were  as  long  as  long.  They  lasted — oo,  'undreds  of  'ours, 
heaps." 

"Didn't  they  get  'ungry?"  said  Joan,  overcome  by  this 
magnificent  invention. 

"They  'ad  free  dinners  every  day,  sometimes  four,  and 
's  many  teas  as  they  wanted.  Out-of-doors.  Only  you  see 
they  didn  't  'ave  to  go  to  bed,  'ardly  ever.  See,  Joan  ?  .  .  . " 

There  had  to  be  a  pause  of  blissful  contemplation  before 
their  minds  could  go  on  to  any  further  invention. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      129 

' '  I  believe  if  I  had  the  fings  I  could  make  Lightning-slick, ' ' 
said  Peter  with  a  rising  inflection  of  the  voice. 

He  did  believe.  As  soon  as  it  was  really  said  he  believed 
it.  Joan,  round-eyed  with  admiration,  believed  too.  .  .  . 

This  Saga  of  Bungo  Peter  did  not  so  much  end  as  die 
out,  when  Aunt  Phyllis  got  little  bicycles  for  her  charges 
after  Joan's  seventh  birthday,  and  they  began  to  ride  to 
school.  You  cannot  tell  legends  on  a  bicycle. 

§  5 

Mr.  Sheldrick  was  a  large,  loose  painter  man  held  together 
by  a  very  hairy  tweed  suit,  and  the  Sheldricks  were  a  large, 
loose  family  not  so  much  born  and  brought  up  as  negligently 
let  loose  into  the  world  at  the  slightest  provocation  by  a 
small  facetious  mother.  It  was  Mr.  Sheldrick  who  painted 
the  scenery  for  the  school  play  productions,  and  it  was  the 
Sheldricks  who  first  put  it  into  Miss  Murgatroyd's  head  that 
children  could  be  reasonably  expected  to  act.  The  elder 
Sheldricks  were  so  to  speak  the  camels  and  giraffes  of  Miss 
Murgatroyd's  school,  but  the  younger  ones  came  down  to 
dimensions  that  made  them  practicable  playmates  for  Joan 
and  Peter.  Every  now  and  then  there  would  be  a  Sheldrick 
birthday  (and  once  Mr.  Sheldrick  sold  a  picture)  and  then 
there  would  be  a  children's  tea-party.  It  was  always  a 
dressing-up  tea-party  at  the  Sheldricks.  The  Sheldrick 
household  possessed  a  big  chest  full  of  pieces  of  coloured 
stuff,  cloaks,  fragmentary  wigs,  tinsel,  wooden  swords  and 
the  like;  this  chest  stood  on  the  big  landing  outside  the  stu- 
dio and  it  was  called  the  "dressing-up  box."  It  was  an  in- 
exhaustible source  of  joy  and  a  liberal  education  to  the 
Sheldricks  and  their  friends. 

There  were  grades  of  experience  in  these  dressing-up 
parties.  At  the  lowest,  when  you  were  just  a  "little  dar- 
ling" fit  only  for  gusty  embraces — .Joan  was  that  to  begin 
with  and  Peter  by  dint  of  a  resolute  angularity  was  but 
battling  his  way  out  of  it — you  put  on  a  preposterous  hat  or 
something  and  ran  about  yelling,  "Look  at  meeeeee !"  Then 


130  JOAN  AND  PETER 

you  rose — Peter  rose  almost  at  once  and  saw  to  it  that  Joan 
rose  too,  to  Dumb  Crambo. 

In  Dumb  Crambo  one  half  of  the  party,  the  bored  half,  is 
' '  in. "  It  chooses  a  word,  such  as  ' '  sleep, ' '  it  tells  the  ' '  outs ' ' 
that  it  rhymes  with  "sneep,"  and  the  "outs"  then  prepare 
and  act  as  rapidly  as  possible,  "deep,"  "creep,"  "sheep," 
and  so  on  until  they  hit  upon  the  right  word.  There  was 
always  much  rushing  about  upon  the  landing,  a  great  fermen- 
tation of  ideas,  a  perpetual  "I  say,  let's ,"  imagination, 

contrivance,  co-operation.  So  rapidly,  joyfully  and  abun- 
dantly, with  a  disarming  effect  of  confusion,  the  Sheldricks 
at  their  tea-parties  did  exactly  what  Miss  Mills  believed  she 
was  doing  in  her  slow,  elaborate,  remote-spirited  Kinder- 
garten lessons,  in  which  she  was  perpetually  saying,  "No; 
no,  dear,  that  isn't  right!"  or  "Now  let  us  all  do  it  over 
again  just  once  more  and  get  it  perfect."  It  was  Peter  who 
discovered  that  these  strange  ritual-exercises  of  Miss  Mills' 
were  really  a  rigid  version  of  the  Sheldrick  entertainments, 
and  tried  to  introduce  novelties  of  gesture  and  facial  play 
and  slight  but  pleasing  variations  in  the  verses.  He  got  a 
laugh  or  so.  But  Miss  Mills  soon  put  a  stop  to  these  experi- 
ments. 

From  Dumb  Crambo  the  Sheldrick  dressing-up  games  rose 
to  scenes  from  history  and  charades.  Then  Mrs.  Sheldrick 
was  moved  to  write  a  children's  play  about  fairies  and 
bluebells  and  butterflies  and  an  angel-child  who  had  died  un- 
timely, a  play  that  broke  out  into  a  wild  burlesque  of  itself 
even  at  its  first  rehearsals.  Then  came  a  wave  of  Shakes- 
pearian enthusiasm  that  was  started  by  the  two  elder  Shel- 
dricks and  skilfully  fostered  by  Daddy  Sheldrick,  who  was 
getting  bored  by  Dumb  Crambo  and  charades.  After  a  lit- 
tle resistance  the  younger  ones  fell  in  with  the  new  move- 
ment and  an  auspicious  beginning  was  made  with  selections 
from  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream.  Miss  Murgatroyd 
was  first  made  aware  of  this  new  development  by  a  case  of 
discipline.  The  second  Sheldrick  girl  was  charged  with 
furtively  learning  passages  of  Shakespeare  by  heart  instead 
of  pretending  to  attend  to  Miss  Mills'  display  of  a  total 
inability  to  explain  the  method  used  in  the  extraction  of  the 
square  root.  Had  it  been  any  other  playwright  than 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEOKGE      131 

Shakespeare,  things  might  have  gone  hard  with  the  Shel- 
driek  girl,  but  "Shakespeare  is  different. " 

Miss  Murgatroyd,  perceiving  there  was  more  in  this  than 
a  mere  question  of  discipline,  came  to  see  one  of  the  SheJdrick 
performances,  was  converted,  and  annexed  the  whole  thing. 
The  next  term  of  school  life  she  made  a  Shakespeare  Boom, 
and  she  astonished  the  world  and  herself  by  an  altogether 
charming  production  of  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream. 
In  those  days  the  histrionic  possibilities  of  young  children 
were  unsuspected  by  the  parents  and  schoolmasters  who 
walked  over  them.  Romeo  was  still  played  in  England  by 
elderly  men  with  time-worn  jowls  and  reverberating  voices, 
and  Juliet  by  dear  old  actresses  for  whom  the  theatre-going 
public  had  a  genuine  filial  affection.  England  had  forgotten 
how  young  she  was  in  the  days  of  good  Queen  Elizabeth. 

Both  Joan  and  Peter  took  a  prominent  part  in  Miss  Murga- 
troyd 's  production  because,  in  spite  of  nearly  four  years  of 
Miss  Mills,  they  still  had  wonderfully  good  memories.  Peter 
made  a  dignified  Oberon  and  also  a  delightfully  quaint 
Thisbe,  and  Joan  was  Puck.  She  danced  a  dance.  She 
danced  in  front  of  the  Queen  Titania  after  the  Fairy  song. 
It  was  a  dance  in  which  she  ceased  to  be  human  and  became 
a  little  brown  imp  with  flashing  snake's  eyes  and  hair  like 
a  thunder-cloud.  It  had  been  invented  years  ago  by  pooi* 
dead  and  drowned  Dolly,  and  the  Sheldricks  had  picked  it 
up  again  from  Joan  and  developed  and  improved  it  for  her. 

§  6 

But  the  Sheldricks  were  not  always  acting  Shakespeare. 
There  were  phases  in  those  tea-parties  when  a  kind  of  wild- 
ness  came  into  their  blood  and  the  blood  of  those  they 
entertained  that  called  for  something  more  violent  than 
dressing-up  or  acting.  Then  in  summertime  they  had  a 
great  scampering  and  hiding  in  the  garden,  it  was  the  sort 
of  garden  where  you  can  run  across  the  beds  and  charge 
through  the  shrubs,  and  in  winter  they  played  "Ogre" 
or  "Darkness  Ogre"  indoors.  In  Ogre  some  one — it  was 
usually  Mr.  Sheldrick — was  Ogre,  and  the  little  corner  room 
out  of  the  hall  was  his  Den.  And  you  hid.  In  the  Shel- 


132  JOAN  AND  PETEE 

drick's  house  you  could  hide  anywhere  except  in  the  studio 
or  the  pantry  and  china  closet;  you  could  hide  in  Mrs. 
Sheldrick's  wardrobe  or  in  the  linen  cupboard  over  the  hot- 
water  pipes  (until  it  got  too  hot  for  you)  or  under  any- 
body's bed  in  anybody's  room.  And  the  Ogre  came  after 
you  and  caught  you — often  by  the  foot  you  had  left  out 
carelessly  beyond  the  counterpane — and  took  you  to  his 
Den,  and  there  you  were  a  prisoner  until  some  brave  soul 
came  careering  across  the  hall  to  touch  your  hand  and  rescue 
you  and  set  you  free  again.  The  Ogre  was  never  safe 
against  rescues  until  every  one  was  caught,  and  everybody 
never  was  caught;  sooner  or  later  came  a  gaol  delivery,  and 
so  the  game  began  all  over  again  and  went  on  until  a  meal 
or  something  released  the  Ogre  or  the  Ogre  struck  work. 
Nobody  was  so  good  an  Ogre  as  Mr.  Sheldrick;  there  wras 
such  a  nice  terribleness  about  him,  and  he  had  a  way  of 
chanting  "Yumpty-Ow.  Yumpty-Ow,"  as  he  came  after 
you. 

Of  course  every  house  is  not  suitable  for  Ogre.  Intelligent 
children  who  understand  the  delights  of  Ogre  classify  homes 
into  two  sorts.  There  are  the  commonplace  homes  we  most 
of  us  inhabit  with  one  staircase,  and  there  are  the  glorious 
homes  with  two,  so  that  you  can  sneak  down  one  while  the 
Ogre  hunts  for  you  up  the  other.  The  Sheldrick  home  had 
two  entirely  separate  staircases  and  a  long  passage  between 
them,  and  a  sort  of  loop-line  arrangement  of  communicating 
bedrooms.  And  also,  though  this  has  nothing  to  do  with 
Ogre,  it  was  easy  to  get  out  upon  the  Sheldrick  roof. 

"Darkness  Ogre"  was  more  exciting  in  a  dreadful  kind 
of  way  than  Ogre.  It  was  only  played  in  winter,  and  all 
the  blinds  and  curtains  were  drawn  and  all  the  lights  put 
out.  You  didn't  need  to  hide.  You  just  got  into  a  corner 
and  stood  still,  holding  your  breath.  And  the  Ogre  took 
off  his  boots  and  put  on  felt  slippers,  and  all  the  noise  he 
made  was  a  rustle  and  a  creak,  and  you  were  never  sure 
that  it  was  him — unless  he  betrayed  himself  by  whispering 
"Yumpty-Ow."  He  creaked  rather  more  than  most,  but 
that  was  a  matter  for  delicate  perceptions.  There  were 
frightful  moments  when  you  could  hear  him  moving  about 
and  feeling  about  in  the  very  room  where  you  stood  frozen, 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      133 

getting  nearer  and  nearer  to  you.     You  had  to  bite  your 
knuckles  not  to  scream. 

Once  when  they  were  playing  Darkness  Ogre,  Peter  was 
in  a  corner  of  Mrs.  Sheldrick's  room  with  Sydney  Sheldrick, 
the  third  of  the  Sheldrick  sisters,  and  they  were  crowding 
up  very  close  together.  And  suddenly  Sydney  put  her  arms 
round  Peter  and  began  to  kiss  his  ears  and  cheek.  Peter 
resisted,  pushed  her  away  from  him.  "Ssh, "  said  Sydney. 
' '  You  be  my  little  sweetheart. ' '  Peter  resisted  this  proposal 
with  vigour.  Then  they  heard  the  Ogre  creaking  down  the 
passage.  Sydney  drew  Peter  closer  to  her,  but  Peter  strug- 
gled away  from  her  and  made  a  dash  for  the  further  door. 
He  was  almost  caught.  He  escaped  because  somebody  else 
started  into  flight  from  the  corner  of  the  landing  outside  the 
studio  and  drew  the  Ogre  off  the  scent. 

Afterwards  Peter  avoided  secluded  corners  when  Sydney 
was  about. 

But  somehow  he  could  not  forget  what  had  happened. 
He  kept  on  thinking  of  Sydney  for  a  time,  and  after  that 
she  seemed  always  to  be  a  little  more  important  than  the 
rest  of  his  older  schoolmates.  Perhaps  it  was  because  she 
took  more  notice  of  him.  She  wanted  to  help  his  work,  and 
she  would  ruffle  his  hair  or  pinch  his  ear  as  she  went  past 
him.  She  wore  a  peculiar  long  jersey  so  that  you  could 
distinguish  her  from  the  others  quite  a  long  way  off.  She 
had  level  brows  and  a  radiant  smile,  her  shoulders  were 
strong  and  her  legs  and  feet  were  very  pretty.  He  noted 
how  well  she  walked.  She  always  seemed  to  be  looking  at 
Peter.  When  he  shut  his  eyes  and  thought  of  her  he  could 
remember  her  better  than  he  could  other  people.  He  did 
not  know  whether  he  liked  her  or  disliked  her  more  than  the 
others;  but  he  perceived  that  she  had  in  some  way  become 
exceptional. 

§  7 

Young  Winterbaum  was  another  of  Miss  Murgatroyd's 
pupils  who  made  a  lasting  impression  on  Peter.  He  was 
dark-eyed  and  fuzzy-haired,  the  contour  of  his  face  had  a 
curious  resemblance  to  that  of  a  sheep,  and  his  head  was 
fixed  on  in  a  different  way  so  that  be  looked  more  skyward 


134  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  down  his  face  at  you.  His  expression  was  one  of 
placid  self-satisfaction;  his  hands  twisted  about,  and  ever 
and  again  he  pranced  as  he  walked.  He  had  a  superfluity 
of  gesture,  and  his  voice  was  a  fat  voice  with  the  remotest 
possible  hint  of  a  lisp.  He  had  two  little  round,  jolly, 
frizzy,  knock-about  sisters  who  ousted  Joan  and  Peter  from 
their  position  as  the  little  darlings  of  the  school.  The  only 
boy  in  the  school  who  at  all  resembled  him  was  young  Cus- 
pard,  but  young  Cuspard  had  not  the  same  bold  lines  either 
in  his  face  or  conduct;  he  was  red-haired,  his  nose  was  a 
snout  instead  of  a  hook,  and  instead  of  rather  full,  well- 
modelled  lips  he  had  that  sort  of  loose  mouth  that  blows. 
Young  Winterbaum  said  his  nose  had  the  Norman  arch,  and 
that  it  showed  he  was  aristocratic  and  one  of  the  conquerors 
of  England.  He  was  second  cousin  to  a  peer,  Lord  Contango. 
It  was  only  slowly  that  Peter  came  to  apprehend  the  full 
peculiarity  of  young  AYinterbaum. 

The  differences  in  form  and  gesture  of  the  two  boys  were 
only  the  outward  and  visible  signs  of  profound  differences 
between  their  imaginations.  For  example,  the  heroes  of 
Peter's  romancings  were  wonderful  humorous  persons, 
Nobbys  and  Bungo  Peters,  and  his  themes  adventures,  strug- 
gles, quests  that  left  them  neither  richer  nor  poorer  than 
before  in  a  limitless,  undisciplined,  delightful  world,  but 
young  "Winterbaum 's  hero  was  himself,  and  he  thought  in 
terms  of  achievement  and  acquisition.  He  was  a  King  and 
the  strongest  and  bravest  and  richest  of  all  Kings.  He  had 
wonderful  horses,  wonderful  bicycles,  wonderful  catapults 
and  an  astonishing  army.  He  counted  these  things.  He 
walked  from  the  other  direction  to  school,  and  though  no  one 
knew  it  but  himself,  he  walked  in  procession.  Guards  went 
before  him  and  behind  him,  and  ancient  councillors  walked 
beside  him.  And  always  he  was  going  on  to  fresh  triumphs 
and  possessions. 

He  had  a  diplomatic  side  to  him.  He  was  prepared  to 
negotiate  upon  the  matter  of  kingship.  One  day  he  reached 
the  crest  above  the  school  while  it  was  still  early,  and  found 
Joan  and  Peter  sitting  and  surveying  the  playground,  wait- 
ing for  the  first  bell  before  they  ran  down.  He  stood  beside 
Peter. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      135 

"All  this  is  my  Kingdom,"  he  said,  waving  both  his  arms 
about  over  the  Weald.  "I  am  King  of  all  this,  I  have  a 
great  army." 

"Not  over  this  part,"  said  Peter  modestly  but  firmly. 

"You  be  King  up  to  here,"  said  young  Winterbaum. 
"Yon  have  an  army  too." 

"7  want  a  kingdom  too,"  said  Joan. 

Young  Winterbaum  proposed  a  fair  division  of  Peter's 
kingdom  between  Joan  and  Peter. 

Peter  let  Joan  have  what  young  Winterbaum  gave  her. 
It  took  some  moments  to  grasp  this  new  situation.  "My 
kingdom,"  he  said  suddenly,  "goes  right  over  to  those  ponds 
there  and  up  to  the  church." 

"You  can't,"  said  young  Winterbaum.  "I've  claimed 
that." 

Peter  grunted.  It  did  not  seem  worth  while  to  have  a 
kingdom  unless  those  ponds  were  included. 

"But  if  you  like  I'll  give  your  people  permission  to  go 
over  all  that  country  whenever  they  like." 

Peter  still  felt  there  was  a  catch  in  it  somewhere. 

"I've  got  a  hundred  and  seven  soldiers,"  said  young 
Winterbaum.  "And  six  guns  that  shoot." 

Joan  was  surprised  and  shocked  to  hear  that  Peter  had 
five  hundred  soldiers. 

"Each  of  my  soldiers,  each  one,  counts  as  a  thousand 
men."  said  young  Winterbaum.  getting  ahead  again. 

Then  the  first  bell  rang  and  suspended  the  dispute.  But 
Peter  went  down  to  the  school  with  a  worried  feeling.  He 
wished  he  had  thought  of  claiming  all  Surrey  as  his  kingdom 
first.  It  was  a  lamentable  oversight.  He  was  disposed  to 
ask  the  eldest  Sheldrick  girl  whether  young  Winterbaum 
really  had  a  right  to  claim  all  the  Weald.  There  was  a  reason 
in  these  things.  .  .  . 

Young  Winterbaum  had  an  extraordinary  knack  of  ac- 
centuating possessions.  Joan  and  Peter  were  very  pleased 
and  proud  to  have  bicycles ;  the  first  time  they  arrived  upon 
them  at  the  school  young  Winterbaum  took  possession  of 
them  and  examined  them  thoroughly.  They  were  really 
good  bicycles,  excellent  bicycles,  he  explained,  and  new,  not 
second-hand;  but  they  were  not  absolutely  the  best  sort. 


136  JOAN  AND  PETER 

The  best  sort  nowadays  had  wood  rims.  He  was  going  to 
have  a  bicycle  with  wood  rims.  And  there  ought  to  be  a 
Bowden  brake  in  front  as  well  as  behind;  the  one  in  front 
was  only  a  spoon  brake.  It  was  a  pity  to  have  a  spoon 
brake;  it  would  injure  the  tyre.  He  doubted  if  the  tubing 
was  helical  tubing.  And  the  bell  wasn't  a  "King  of  the 
Uoad."  It  was  no  good  for  Peter  to  pretend  it  had  a  good 
sound,  "the  King  of  the  Road"  had  a  better  sound.  When 
young  Winterbaum  got  his  bicycle  his  bell  was  going  to  be 
a  "King  of  the  Road,  1902  pattern."  .  .  . 

Young  Winterbaum  was  always  doing  this  with  things, 
bringing  them  up  into  the  foreground  of  life,  grading  them, 
making  them  competitive  and  irritating.  There  was  no  get- 
ting ahead  of  him.  He  made  Peter  feel  that  the  very  dust 
in  the  Winterbaum  dustbin  was  Grade  A.  Standard  I.  while 
The  Ingle-Nook  was  satisfied  with  any  old  makeshift  stuff. 

Young  Winterbaum 's  clothes  were  made  by  Samuelson 's, 
the  best  boys'  tailor  in  London;  there  wTas  no  disputing  it 
because  there  was  an  advertisement  in  The  Daily  Telegraph 
that  said  as  much ;  he  was  in  trousers  and  Peter  had  knicker- 
bockers; he  wore  sock  suspenders,  and  he  had  his  name  in 
gold  letters  inside  his  straw  hat.  Also  he  had  a  pencil- 
case  like  no  other  pencil-case  in  the  school.  He  was  always 
proposing  a  comparison  of  pencil-cases. 

His  imagination  turned  precociously  and  easily  to  ro- 
mance and  love  and  the  beauty  of  women.  He  read  a 
number  of  novelettes  that  he  had  borrowed  from  his  sister's 
nurse.  He  imparted  to  Peter  the  idea  of  a  selective  pairing 
off  of  the  species,  an  idea  for  which  A  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream  had  already  prepared  a  favourable  soil.  It  was 
after  he  had  seen  Joan  dance  her  dance  when  that  play  was 
performed  and  heard  the  unstinted  applause  that  greeted  her, 
that  he  decided  to  honour  her  above  all  the  school  with  his 
affections.  Previously  he  had  wavered  between  the  eldest 
Sheldrick  girl  because  she  was  the  biggest,  tallest  and  heav- 
iest girl  in  the  school  (though  a  formidable  person  to  ap- 
proach) and  little  Minnie  Restharrow  who  was  top  in  so  many 
classes.  But  now  he  knew  that  Joan  was  "it,"  and  that  he 
was  in  love  with  her. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      137 

But  some  instinct  told  him  that  Peter  had  to  be  dealt  with. 

He  approached  Peter  in  this  manner. 

"Who's  your  girl,  Peter?"  said  young  Winterbaum. 
"Who  is  your  own  true  love?  You've  got  to  have  some 
one." 

Peter  drew  a  bow  at  a  venture,  and  subconscious  processes 
guided  the  answer.  "Sydney  Sheldrick,"  he  said. 

Young  Winterbaum  seemed  to  snatch  even  before  Peter 
had  done  speaking.  "I'm  going  to  have  Joan,"  he  said. 
"She  dances  better  than  any  one.  She's  going  to  be,  oh! 
— a  lovely  woman. ' ' 

Peter  was  dimly  aware  of  an  error.  He  had  forgotten 
Joan.  "I'm  going  to  have  Joan  too,"  he  said. 

"You  can't  have  two  sweethearts,"  said  young  Winter- 
baum. 

"I  can.     I'm  going  to.     I'm  different." 

"But  Joan's  mine  already." 

"Get  out,"  said  Peter  indignantly.  "You  can't  have 
her." 

"But  she's  mine." 

"Shut  it,"  said  Peter  vulgarly. 

"I'll  fight  you  a  duel  for  her.  We  will  fight  a  real  duel 
for  her. ' ' 

"You  hadn't  better  begin,"  said  Peter. 

"But  I  mean — you  know — a  duel,  Peter." 

"Let's  fight  one  now,"  said  Peter,  "  'f  you  think  you're 
going  to  have  Joan  for  your  girl." 

"We  will  fight  with  swords." 

"Sticks." 

"Yes,  but  call  them  swords.  And  we  shall  have  to  have 
seconds  and  a  doctor." 

"Joan's  my  second." 

"You  can't  have  Joan.  My  second's  the  Grand  Duke  of 
Surrey-Sussex." 

"Then  mine's  Bungo-Peter. " 

"But  we've  got  no  sticks." 

"I  know  where  there's  two  sticks,"  said  Peter.  "Under 
the  stairs.  And  we  can  fight  in  the  shrubbery  over  by  the 
fence. ' ' 


138  JOAN  AND  PETER 

The  sticks  were  convenient  little  canes.  "They  ought  to 
have  hilts,"  said  young  Winterbaum.  "You  ever  fenced?" 

"Not  much,"  said  Peter  guardedly. 

"I've  often  fenced  with  my  cousin,  the  honourable  Ralph 
— you  know.  Like  this — guard.  One.  Two.  You've  got 
to  have  a  wrist." 

They  repaired  to  the  field  of  battle.  ' '  We  stand  aside  while 
the  seconds  pace  out  the  ground,"  explained  young  Winter- 
baum. "Now  we  shake  hands.  Now  \ve  take  our  places. " 

They  proceeded  to  strike  fencer-like  attitudes.  Young 
Winterbaum  suddenly  became  one  of  the  master  swordsmen 
of  the  world,  but  Peter  was  chiefly  intent  on  where  he  should 
hit  young  Winterbaum.  He  had  got  to  hit  him  and  hurt 
him  a  lot,  or  else  he  would  get  Joan.  They  crossed  swords. 
Then  young  Winterbaum  feinted  and  Peter  hit  him  hard  on 
the  arm.  Then  young  Winterbaum  thrust  Peter  in  the  chest, 
and  began  to  explain  at  once  volubly  that  Peter  was  now 
defeated  and  dead  and  everything  conclusively  settled. 

But  nobody  was  going  to  take  away  Peter's  Joan  on  such 
easy  terms.  Peter,  giving  his  antagonist  no  time  to  com- 
plete his  explanation,  slashed  him  painfully  on  the  knuckles. 
"I'm  not  dead,"  said  Peter,  slashing  again.  "I'm  not  dead. 
See?  Come  on!" 

Whereupon  young  Winterbaum  cried  out,  as  it  were  with 
a  trumpet,  in  a  loud  and  grief-stricken  voice.  "Now  I 
shall  hurt  you.  That's  too  much,"  and  swiped  viciously  at 
Peter's  face  and  raised  a  weal  on  Peter's  cheek.  Whereupon 
Peter,  feeling  that  Joan  was  slipping  from  him,  began  to  rain 
blows  upon  young  Winterbaum  wherever  young  Winterbaum 
might  be  supposed  to  be  tender,  and  young  Winterbaum  be- 
gan to  dance  about  obliquely  and  cry  out,  "Mustn't  hit  my 
legs.  Mustn't  hit  my  legs.  Not  fair.  Oo-oh !  my  knuck- 
les!" And  after  one  or  two  revengeful  slashes  at  Peter's 
head  which  Peter — who  had  had  his  experiences  with  Joan 
in  a  rage — parried  with  an  uplifted  arm,  young  Winter- 
baum turned  and  ran — ran  into  the  arms  of  Miss  Murgatroyd, 
who  had  been  attracted  to  the  shrubbery  by  his  cries.  .  .  . 

It  was  the  first  fight  that  had  ever  happened  in  the  school 
of  St.  George  and  the  Venerable  Bede  since  its  foundation. 

"He  said  I  couldn't  fight  him,"  said  Peter. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      139 

' '  He  went  on  fighting  after  I  'd  pinked  him, ' '  said  young 
Winterbaum. 

Neither  of  them  said  a  word  about  Joan. 

So  Miss  Murgatroyd  made  a  great  session  of  the  school, 
and  the  two  combatants,  flushed  and  a  little  heroic,  sat  on 
either  side  of  her  discourse.  She  said  that  this  was  the 
first  time  she  had  ever  had  to  reprove  any  of  her  pupils  for 
fighting.  She  hoped  that  never  again  would  it  be  necessary 
for  her  to  do  so.  She  said  that  nothing  we  could  do  was  quite 
so  wicked  as  fighting  because  nothing  was  so  flatly  contra- 
dictory to  our  Lord's  commandment  that  we  should  love  one 
another.  The  only  fight  we  might  fight  with  a  good  con- 
science was  the  good  fight.  In  that  sense  we  were  all  war- 
riors. We  were  fighters  for  righteousness.  In  a  sense  every 
one  was  a  knight  and  a  fighter,  every  girl  as  well  as  every 
boy.  Because  there  was  no  more  reason  why  girls  should 
not  fight  as  well  as  boys.  Some  day  she  hoped  this  would  be 
recognized,  and  girls  would  be  given  knighthoods  and  wear 
their  spurs  as  proudly  as  the  opposite  sex.  Earth  was  a 
battlefield,  and  none  of  us  must  be  dumb  driven  cattle  or 
submit  to  injustice  or  cruelty.  We  must  not  think  that  life 
was  made  for  silken  ease  or  self-indulgence.  Let  us  think 
rather  of  the  Red  Indian  perpetually  in  training  for  con- 
flict, lean  and  vigorous  and  breathing  only  through  his  nose. 
No  one  who  breathed  through  his  or  her  open  mouth  would 
ever  be  a  fighter. 

At  this  point  Miss  Murgatroyd  seemed  to  hesitate  for  a 
time.  Breathing  was  a  very  attractive  topic  to  her,  and 
it  was  drawing  her  away  from  her  main  theme.  She  was,  so 
to  speak,  dredging  for  her  lost  thread  in  the  swift  under- 
tow of  hygienic  doctrine  as  one  might  dredge  for  a  lost  cable. 
She  got  it  presently,  and  concluded  by  hoping  that  this  would 
be  a  lesson  to  Philip  and  Peter  and  that  henceforth  they 
would  learn  that  great  lesson  of  Prince  Kropotkin's  that  co- 
operation is  better  than  conflict. 

Neither  of  the  two  combatants  listened  very  closely  to  this 
discourse.  Peter  was  wrestling  with  the  question  whether  a 
hot  red  weal  across  one's  cheek  is  compatible  with  victory, 
and  young  Winterbaum  with  the  still  more  subtle  difficulty 
of  whether  he  had  been  actually  running  away  or  merely 


140  JOAN  AND  PETER 

stepping  back  when  he  had  collided  with  Miss  Murgatroyd, 
and  what  impression  this  apparently  retrograde  movement 
had  made  on  her  mind  and  upon  the  mind  of  Peter.  Did 
they  understand  that  sometimes  a  swordsman  had  to  go  back 
and  could  go  back  without  the  slightest  discredit?  .  .  . 

§  8 

After  this  incident  the  disposal  of  Joan  ceased  to  be  a 
topic  for  conversation  between  young  Winterbaum  and  Peter, 
and  presently  young  Winterbaum  conveyed  to  Peter  in  an 
offhand  manner  that  he  adored  Minnie  Restharrow  as  the 
cleverest  and  most  charming  girl  in  the  school.  She  was  in- 
deed absolutely  the  best  thing  to  be  got  in  that  way.  She 
was,  he  opined,  cleverer  even  than  Miss  Murgatroyd.  He 
was  therefore,  he  intimated,  in  love  with  Minnie  Restharrow. 
It  was  a  great  passion. 

So  far  as  Peter  was  concerned,  he  gathered,  it  might  be. 

All  the  canons  of  romance  required  that  Peter,  having 
fought  for  and  won  Joan,  should  thereupon  love  Joan  and 
her  only  until  he  was  of  an  age  to  marry  her.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  having  disposed  of  this  invader  of  his  private 
ascendancy  over  Joan,  he  thought  no  more  of  her  in  that  re- 
lationship. He  decided,  however,  that  if  young  Winterbaum 
was  going  to  have  a  sweetheart  he  must  have  one  too,  and 
mysterious  processes  of  his  mind  indicated  Sydney  Sheldrick 
as  the  only  possible  person.  It  was  not  that  Peter  particu- 
larly wanted  a  sweetheart,  but  he  was  not  going  to  let  young 
Winterbaum  come  it  over  him — any  more  than  he  was  going 
to  let  young  Winterbaum  be  King  of  more  than  half  of  Sur- 
rey. He  was  profoundly  bored  by  all  this  competitiveness, 
but  obscure  instincts  urged  him  to  keep  his  end  up. 

One  day  Miss  Murgatroyd  was  expatiating  to  the  mother 
of  a  prospective  pupil  upon  the  wonderful  effects  of  co- 
education in  calming  the  passions.  "The  boys  and  girls 
grow  up  together,  get  used  to  each  other,  and  there's  never 
any  nonsense  between  them." 

"And  don't  they — well,  take  an  interest  in  each  other?" 

"Not  in  that  way.  Not  in  any  undesirable  way.  Such  as 
they  would  if  they  had  been  morbidly  separated." 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  ST.  GEORGE      141 

''But  it  seems  almost  unnatural  for  them  not  to  take  an 
interest. ' ' 

"Experience,  I  can  assure  you,  shows  otherwise,"  said  Miss 
Murgatroyd  conclusively. 

At  that  moment  two  figures,  gravely  conversing  together, 
passed  across  the  lawn  in  the  middle  distance;  one  was  a 
well-grown  girl  of  thirteen  in  a  short-skirted  gymnasium 
dress,  the  other  a  nice-looking  boy  of  ten,  knickerbockered, 
bare-legged,  sandalled,  and  wearing  the  art  green  blouse  of 
the  school.  They  looked  the  most  open-air  and  unsophisti- 
cated children  of  modernity  it  was  possible  to  conceive.  This 
is  what  they  were  saying: 

"Sydney,  when  I  grow  up  I'm  going  to  marry  you.  You 
got  to  be  my  sweetheart.  See?" 

"You  darling!  Is  that  what  you  have  to  tell  me?  I 
didn't  think  you  loved  me  a  little  bit." 

"  I  'm  going  to  marry  you, ' '  said  Peter,  sticking  to  the  facts 
of  the  case. 

"  I  'd  hug  you.  Only  old  Muggy  is  looking  out  of  the  win- 
dow. But  the  very  first  chance  I  get  I'll  kiss  you.  And 
you'll  have  to  kiss  me  back,  mind,  Peter." 

"Where  some  one  can't  see  us,"  Peter  stipulated. 

"Oh!  I  love  spooning,"  said  the  ardent  Sydney. 
"  'Member  when  I  kissed  you  before?  ..." 

"The  girls  refine  the  boys  and  the  whole  atmosphere  is  just 
a  family  atmosphere,"  Miss  Murgatroyd  was  explaining  at 
the  window. 


CHAPTER  THE  EIGHTH 

THB   HIGH   CROSS   PREPARATORY   SCHOOL 
§    1 

FROM  the  time  when  he  was  christened  until  he  was 
ten,  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  remained  only  a  figure 
in  the  remotest  background  of  Peter's  life.  Once  or 
twice  he  saw  her  in  the  downstairs  room  at  The  Ingle-Nook 
with  his  aunts  bristling  defensively  beside  her,  and  once  she 
came  to  the  school,  and  each  time  she  looked  at  him  with  a 
large,  hard,  hostile  smile  and  said:  "And  ha-ow's  Peter?" 
and  then  with  a  deepening  disapproval:  "Ila-ow's  Joan?" 
But  that  did  not  mean  that  Lady  Charlotte  had  done  with 
Joan  and  Peter,  nor  that  she  had  relinquished  in  the  slight- 
est degree  her  claims  to  dominate  their  upbringing.  She 
was  just  letting  them  grow  up  a  little  "according  to  their 
mother's  ideas,  poor  woman,"  and  biding  her  time.  She 
wrote  every  now  and  then  to  Aunts  Phyllis  and  Phoebe, 
just  to  remind  them  of  her  authority,  and  she  wrote  two  long 
and  serious  letters  to  Oswald  about  what  was  to  be  done.  He 
answered  her  briefly  in  such  terms  as:  "Let  well  alone. 
Religion  comes  later."  Oswald  had  never  returned  to  Eng- 
land. He  had  been  in  Uganda  now  for  five  long  years,  and 
her  fear  of  him  was  dying  down.  She  was  beginning  to  think 
that  perhaps  he  did  not  care  very  much  for  Joan  and  Peter. 
He  had  had  blackwater  fever  again.  Perhaps  he  would 
never  come  home  any  more. 

Then  in  the  years  1901  and  1902  she  had  been  much  oc- 
cupied by  a  special  campaign  against  various  London  social- 
ists that  had  ended  in  a  libel  case.  She  was  quite  convinced 
that  all  socialists  were  extremely  immoral  people,  she  was 
greatly  alarmed  at  the  spread  of  socialism,  and  so  she  wrote 
and  employed  a  secretary  to  write  letters  to  a  number  of 

142 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       143 

people  marked  "private  and  confidential,"  warning1  them 
against  this  or  that  prominent  socialist.  In  these  she  made 
various  definite  statements  which,  as  her  counsel  vainly  tried 
to  argue,  were  not  to  be  regarded  as  statements  of  fact  so 
much  as  illustrations  of  the  tendency  of  socialist  teaching. 
She  was  tackled  by  a  gentleman  in  a  red  necktie  named 
Bamshot,  of  impregnable  virtue,  in  whom  her  free  gift  of 
"numerous  illegitimate  children"  had  evoked  no  gratitude. 
Her  efforts  to  have  him  "thoroughly  cross-examined"  pro- 
duced no  sympathy  in  either  judge  or  jury.  All  men,  she 
realized,  are  wicked  and  anxious  to  shield  each  other.  She 
left  the  court  with  a  passionate  and  almost  uncontrollable 
desire  to  write  more  letters  about  Bamshot  and  more,  worse 
than  ever,  and  with  much  nastier  charges.  And  it  was  per- 
haps a  subconscious  effort  to  shift  the  pressure  of  this  danger- 
ous impulse  that  turned  her  mind  to  the  state  of  spiritual 
neglect  in  which  Joan  and  Peter  were  growing  out  of  child- 
hood. 

A  number  of  other  minor  causes  moved  her  in  the  same 
direction.  She  had  had  a  violent  quarrel  about  the  "bill  with 
the  widow  of  an  Anglican  clergyman  who  kept  her  favourite 
pension  at  Bordighera;  and  she  could  still  not  forgive  the 
establishment  at  Pallanza  that,  two  years  before,  had  refused 
to  dismiss  its  head-waiter  for  saying  "Vivent  les  Boers!" 
in  her  hearing.  She  had  been  taking  advice  about  a  suitable 
and  thoroughly  comfortable  substitute  for  these  resorts,  and 
meanwhile  she  had  stayed  on  in  England — until  there  were 
oysters  on  the  table.  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  had  an  un- 
refined appetite  for  oysters,  and  with  oysters  came  a  still 
less  refined  craving  for  Dublin  stout.  It  was  an  odd  secret 
weakness  understood  only  by  her  domestics,  and  noted  only 
by  a  small  circle  of  intimate  friends. 

"I  don't  seem  to  fancy  anything  very  much  to-day,  Un- 
win,"  Lady  Charlotte  used  to  say. 

"I  don't  know  if  you'd  be  tempted  by  a  nice  oyster  or 
two,  m'lady.  They're  very  pick-me-up  things,"  the  faith- 
ful attendant  would  suggest.  "It's  September  now,  and 
there's  an  R  in  the  month,  so  it's  safe  to  venture." 

"Mm." 

"And  if  I  might  make  so  bold  as  to  add  a  'arf  bottle  of 


144  JOAN  AND  PETER 

good  Guinness,  m'lady.  It's  a  tonic.  Run  down  as  you 
are." 

Without  oysters  neither  Lady  Charlotte  nor  Unwin  would 
have  considered  stout  a  proper  drink  for  a  lady.  And  in- 
deed it  was  not  a  proper  drink  for  Lady  Charlotte.  A  very 
little  stout  sufficed  to  derange  her  naturally  delicate  internal 
chemistry.  Upon  the  internal  chemistry  of  Lady  Charlotte 
her  equanimity  ultimately  depended.  There  is  wrath  in 
stout.  .  .  . 

Then  Mr.  Grimes,  who  had  never  ceased  to  hope  that  con- 
siderable out-of-court  activities  might  still  be  developed 
around  these  two  little  wards,  had  taken  great  pains  to  bring 
Aunt  Phoebe's  Collected  Papers  of  a  Stitchwoman  (Sec- 
ond Series]  and  her  little  precious  volume  Carmen  Natural 
before  his  client's  notice. 

These  books  certainly  made  startling  reading  for  Lady 
Charlotte.  She  had  never  seen  the  first  "Stitchwoman" 
papers,  she  knew  nothing  of  Swinburne,  Ruskin,  Carlyle,  the 
decadents,  nothing  of  the  rich  inspirations  of  the  later  Vic- 
torian period,  and  so  the  almost  luscious  richness  of  Aunt 
Phoebe's  imagination,  her  florid  verbiage,  her  note  of  sensu- 
ous defiance,  burst  almost  devastatingly  upon  a  mind  that 
was  habituated  to  the  ordered  passions  and  pearly  greys  of 
Mrs.  Henry  Wood's  novels  More  Leaves,  Good  Words,  and 
The  Quiver. 

1 '  '  With  what  measure  ye  mete, '  ' '  she  read,  "  '  so  shall  it  be 
meted  unto  you  again,'  and  the  Standard  that  Man  has  fixed 
for  woman  recoils  now  upon  his  head.  Which  standard  is 
it  to  be, — His  or  Hers?  No  longer  can  we  fight  under  two 
flags.  Wild  oats,  or  the  Immaculate  Banner?  Question  to 
be  answered  shrewdly,  and  according  to  whether  we  deem 
it  is  Experience  or  Escape  we  live  for,  now  that  we  are  out  of 
Eden  footing  it  among  the  sturdy,  exhilarating  thistles. 
What  will  ye,  my  masters? — pallid  man  unstained,  or  sea- 
soned woman  ?  Judgment  hesitates.  Judgment  may  indeed 
hesitate.  I,  who  sit  here  stitching,  mark  her  hesitation,  my- 
self— observant.  Is  it  too  bold  a  speculation  that  presently 
golden  lassies  as  well  as  golden  lads  will  sow  their  wild  oats 
bravely  on  the  slopes  of  life?  Is  it  too  much  to  dream  of 
that  grave  mother  of  a  greater  world,  the  Woman  of  the 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       145 

Future,  glancing  back  from  the  glowing  harvest  of  her  life 
to  some  tall  premonition  by  the  wayside? — her  One  "Wild 
Oat !  the  crown  and  seal  of  her  education  ! ' ' 

"Either  she  means  nothing  by  that,"  said  Lady  Charlotte, 
"or  she  means  just  sheer  depravity.  Wild  Oat,  indeed! 
Really!  To  call  it  that!  With  Joan  on  her  hands  already!" 

And  here  again  is  a  little  poem  from  Carmen  Naturce, 
which  also  impressed  Lady  Charlotte  very  unfavourably: 

THE  MATERIALIST  SINGS 

Put  by  your  tangled  Trinities 

And  let  the  atoms  swing, 
The  merry  magic  atoms 

That  trace  out  everything. 

These  ancient  gods  are  fantasies, 

Mere  Metaphors  and  Names; 
But  I  can  feel  the  Vortex  Ring 

Go  singing  through  my  veins. 

No  casket  of  a  pallid  ghost, 

But  all  compact  of  thrills, 
My  body  beats  and  throbs  and  lives, 

My  Mighty  Atom  wills. 

"1  don't  know  what  the  world  is  coming  to,"  said  Lady 
Charlotte.  ' '  In  other  times  a  woman  who  ventured  to  write 
such  blasphemy  would  have  been  Struck  Dead.  ..." 

"Thrills  again!"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  turning  over  the 
offending  pages.  "In  a  book  that  any  one  may  read.  Ex- 
posing her  thrills  to  any  Bagman  who  chooses  to  put  down 
three  and  sixpence  for  the  pleasure.  Imagine  it,  Unwin!" 

Unwin  did  her  best,  assuming  an  earnest  expression.  .  .  . 

Other  contributory  influences  upon  Lady  Charlotte's  state 
of  mind  were  her  secret  anxiety  for  the  moral  welfare  of 
the  realm  now  that  Queen  Victoria  had  given  place  to  the 
notoriously  lax  Edward  VII.,  and  the  renascence  of  sectar- 
ian controversies  in  connexion  with  Mr.  Balfour's  Education 
Act.  Anglicanism  was  rousing  itself  for  a  new  struggle  to 
keep  hold  of  the  nation's  children,  the  Cecils  and  Lord  Hali- 
fax were  ranging  wide  and  free  with  the  educational  drag- 
net, and  Lady  Charlotte  was  a  part  of  the  great  system  of 


146  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Anglicanism.  The  gale  that  blows  the  ships  home,  lifts  the 
leaves.  .  .  .  But  far  more  powerful  than  any  of  these  causes 
was  the  death  of  a  certain  Mr.  Pybus,  who  was  Unwiu's 
brother-in-law;  he  died  through  an  operation  undertaken  by 
a  plucky  rather  than  highly  educated  general  practitioner, 
to  remove  a  neglected  tumour.  This  left  Uuwin's  sister  in 
want  of  subsidies,  and  while  Unwin  lay  in  bed  one  night 
puzzling  over  this  family  problem,  it  occurred  to  her  that 
if  her  sister  could  get  some  little  girl  to  mind .  .  . 

§  2 

Mr.  Grimes  was  very  helpful  and  sympathetic  when  Lady 
Charlotte  consulted  him.  He  repeated  the  advice  he  had 
given  five  years  ago,  that  Lady  Charlotte  should  not  litigate 
but  act,  and  so  thrust  upon  the  other  parties  the  onus  of 
litigation.  She  should  obtain  possession  of  the  two  children, 
put  them  into  suitable  schools — "I  don't  see  how  we  can 
put  that  By-blow  into  a  school,"  Lady  Charlotte  interpo- 
lated— and  refuse  to  let  the  aunts  know  where  they  were 
until  they  consented  to  reasonable  terms,  to  the  proper  re- 
ligious education  of  the  children,  to  their  proper  clothing, 
and  to  their  separation.  "Directly  we  have  the  engagement 
of  the  Misses  Stubland  not  to  disturb  the  new  arrangement, ' ' 
said  Mr.  Grimes,  "we  shall  have  gained  our  point.  I  see  no 
harm  in  letting  the  children  rejoin  their  aunts  for  their  holi- 
days." 

"That  woman  may  corrupt  them  at  any  time,"  said 
Lady  Charlotte. 

"On  that  point  we  can  watch  and  enquire.  Of  course,  the 
boy  might  stay  at  the  school  for  the  holiday  times.  There 
is  a  class  of  school  which  caters  for  that  sort  of  tiling.  That 
we  can  see  to  later."  .  .  . 

Mr.  Grimes  arranged  all  the  details  of  the  abduction  of 
Joan  and  Peter  with  much  tact  and  imagination.  As  a  pre- 
liminary step  he  made  Lady  Charlotte  write  to  Aunt  Phosbe 
expressing  her  opinion  that  the  time  was  now  ripe  to  put 
the  education  of  the  children  upon  a  rational  footing.  They 
were  no  longer  little  children,  and  it  was  no  longer  possible 
for  them  to  go  on  as  they  were  going.  Peter  was  born  an 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      147 

English  gentleman,  and  he  ought  to  go  to  a  good  preparatory 
school  for  boys  forthwith;  Joan's  destinies  in  life  were  differ- 
ent, but  they  were  certainly  destinies  for  which  play-acting, 
running  about  with  bare  feet,  and  dressing  like  a  little 
savage  could  be  no  sort  of  training.  Lady  Charlotte  (Mr. 
Grimes  made  her  say)  had  been  hoping  against  hope  that 
some  suggestion  for  a  change  would  come  from  the  Misses 
Stubland.  She  could  not  hope  against  hope  for  ever.  She 
must  therefore  request  a  conference,  at  which  Mr.  Grimes 
could  be  present,  for  a  discussion  of  the  new  arrangements 
that  were  now  urgently  necessary.  To  this  the  Misses  Stub- 
land  replied  evasively  and  carelessly.  In  their  reply  Mr. 
Grimes,  without  resentment,  detected  the  hand  of  Mr.  Syca- 
more. They  were  willing  to  take  part  in  a  conference  as  soon 
as  Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham  returned.  They  had  reason  to 
believe  he  was  on  his  way  to  England  now. 

Lady  Charlotte,  still  guided  by  Mr.  Grimes,  then  assumed 
a  more  peremptory  tone.  She  declared  that  in  the  interests 
of  both  children  it  was  impossible  for  things  to  go  on  any 
longer  as  they  had  been  going.  Already  the  boy  was  ten. 
The  plea  that  nothing  could  be  done  until  Mr.  Sydenham  re- 
turned was  a  mere  delaying  device.  The  boy  ought  to  go  to 
school  forthwith.  Lady  Charlotte  was  extremely  sorry  that 
the  Misses  Stubland  would  not  come  to  any  agreement  upon 
this  urgent  matter.  She  could  not  rest  content  with  things 
in  this  state,  and  she  would  be  obliged  to  consider  what  her 
course  of  action — for  the  time  had  come  for  her  to  take  ac- 
tion— must  be. 

With  the  way  thus  cleared,  Mr.  Grimes  set  his  forces  in 
motion.  "Leave  it  to  me,  Lady  Charlotte,"  he  said.  "Leave 
it  to  me. ' '  A  polite  young  man  appeared  one  morning  seated 
in  a  chariot  of  fire  outside  the  road  gate  of  the  School  of  St. 
George  and  the  Venerable  Bede.  He  was  in  one  of  those 
strange  and  novel  portents,  a  "motor-car."  This  alone  made 
him  interesting  and  attractive,  and  it  greatly  impressed 
young  "Winterbaum  to  discover  that  the  visitor  had  come 
about  Joan  and  Peter.  Young  Winterbaum  went  out  to 
scrutinize  the  motor-car  and  its  driver,  and  see  if  there  was 
anything  wrong  about  it.  But  it  was  difficult  to  underesti- 
mate. 


148  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"It's  a  petrol  car,"  he  said.  "Belsize.  .  .  .  Those  are 
fine  lamps." 

Miss  Murgatroyd  gathered  that  the  guardians  of  Joan  and 
Peter  found  it  necessary  to  interview  the  children,  and  had 
sent  the  car  to  fetch  them. 

"Miss  Stubland  said  nothing  of  this  when  I  saw 
her  the  day  before  yesterday,"  said  Miss  Murgatroyd. 
"We  do  not  care  for  interruptions  in  the  children's 
work. ' ' 

The  young  man  explained  that  the  case  was  urgent 
"Lady  Charlotte  has  been  called  away.  And  she  must  see 
the  children  before  she  goes  out  of  England." 

There  was  something  very  reassuring  about  the  motor-car. 
They  departed  cheerfully  to  the  ill-concealed  envy  and  ad- 
miration of  young  Winterbaum. 

The  young  man  had  red  hair,  a  white,  freckled  face,  and 
a  costly  and  remarkable  made-up  necktie  of  green  plush. 
The  expression  of  his  pale  blue  eyes  was  apprehensive,  and 
ever  and  again  he  blew.  His  efforts  at  conversation  were 
fragmentary  and  unilluminating.  "I  got  to  take  you  for 
a  long  ride,"  he  said,  seating  himself  between  Peter  and 
Joan.  "A  lovely  long  ride." 

"Where?"  said  Joan. 

"You'll  see  in  a  bit,"  said  the  young  man. 

"We  going  to  Chastlands?"  asked  Peter. 

"No,"  said  the  young  man. 

"Then  where  are  we  going?"  said  Peter. 

"These  here  cars '11  do  forty — fifty  miles  an  hour,"  said 
the  young  man,  changing  the  subject. 

In  a  little  while  they  had  passed  beyond  the  limits  of 
Peter's  knowledge  altogether,  and  were  upon  an  unknown 
road.  It  was  astonishing  how  the  car  devoured  the  road. 
You  saw  a  corner  a  long  way  off  and  then  immediately  you 
were  turning  this  corner.  The  car  went  as  swiftly  up  the 
hills  as  down.  It  said  "honk."  The  trees  and  hedges  flew 
by  as  if  one  was  in  a  train,  and  behind  we  trailed  a  marvel- 
lous cloud  of  dust.  The  driver  sat  before  us  with  his  head 
sunken  between  his  hunched-up  shoulders;  he  never  seemed 
to  move;  he  was  quite  different  from  the  swaying,  noble 
coachman  with  the  sun-red  face,  wearing  a  top  hat  with  a 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       149 

waist  and  a  broad  brim,  who  sat  erect  and  poised  his  whip 
and  drove  Lady  Charlotte's  white  horse. 

§  3 

For  a  time  the  road  ran  undulating  between  high  hedges 
and  tall  trees  and  through  villages,  and  all  along  to  the 
right  of  it  were  the  steep,  round-headed  Downs.  Then  came 
a  little  town,  and  the  automobile  turned  off  into  a  valley 
that  cut  the  Downs  across  and  opened  out  more  and  more, 
and  then  came  heathery  common  and  a  town,  and  then  lanes 
and  many  villages,  flat  meadows  and  flatter,  poplars,  and 
then  another  town  with  a  bridge,  and  then  across  long  levels 
of  green  a  glimpse  of  the  big  tower  of  Windsor  Castle. 
"This  is  Runnymede,  where  Magna  Carta  was  signed,"  said 
the  young  man  suddenly.  "And  that's  "Windsor,  where  the 
King  lives — when  he  isn't  living  somewhere  else,  as  he  usu- 
ally does.  .  .  .  He's  a  'ot  un  is  the  King.  .  .  .  See  the  chap 
there  sailing  a  boat?" 

They  went  right  into  "Windsor  and  had  a  glimpse  of  the 
great  gates  of  the  Castle  and  the  round  tower  very  near  to 
them,  and  then  they  turned  down  a  steep,  narrow,  paved 
street  and  so  came  into  a  district  of  little  mean  villas  in 
rows  and  rows.  And  outside  one  of  these  the  car  stopped. 

"Here  we  are,"  said  the  young  man. 

"Where  are  we?"  asked  Peter. 

"Where  we  get  out,"  said  the  young  man.  "Time  we  had 
a  feed." 

"Dinnah,"  said  Joan,  with  a  bright  expression,  and  pre- 
pared to  descend. 

A  small,  white-faced,  anxious  woman  appeared  at  the 
door.  She  was  wearing  amiability  as  one  wears  a  Sabbath 
garment.  Moreover,  she  had  a  greyish-black  dress  that  ended 
in  a  dingy,  stiff  buff  frilling  at  the  neck  and  wrists. 

"You  Mrs.  Pybus?"  asked  the  young  man. 

"I  been  expecting  you  a  nour, "  said  Mrs.  Pybus,  acquiesc- 
ing in  the  name.  "Is  this  the  young  lady  and  gentleman?" 

That  again  was  a  question  that  needed  no  answer.  The 
group  halted  awkwardly  on  the  doorstep  for  a  few  seconds. 
"And  this  is  Miss  Joan?"  said  Mrs.  Pybus,  with  a  joyless 


150  JOAN  AND  PETER 

smile.  "I  didn't  expect  you  to  be  'arf  yr'  size.  And  what 
a  short  dress  they  put  you  in!  You  must  'ave  regular  shot 
up.  Makes  you  what  I  call  leggy.  ..." 

This  again  was  poor  as  a  conversational  opening. 

"  'Ow  old  might  you  be,  dearie?"  asked  Mrs.  Pybus. 

"I'm  eight,"  said  Joan.     "But  I'll  be  nine  soon." 

The  young  man  for  inscrutable  reasons  found  this  funny. 
He  guffawed.  "She's  eight,"  he  said  to  the  world  at  large; 
"but  she'll  be  nine  soon.  That's  good,  that  is!" 

"If  you're  spared,  you  shud  say,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus. 
"You're  a  big  eight,  any'ow.  'Ow  old  are  you,  dear?" 

Peter  was  disliking  her  quietly  with  his  hands  in  his 
pockets.  He  paused  for  a  moment,  doubting  whether  he 
would  answer  to  the  name  of  "dear."  "Ten,"  he  said. 

"Just  ten?"  asked  the  young  man  as  if  alert  for  humour. 

Peter  nodded,  and  the  young  man  was  thwarted. 

"I  suppose  you'll  be  ready  for  something  to  eat,"  said  Mrs. 
Pybus.  "  'Adn't  you  better  come  in?" 

They  went  in. 

The  room  they  entered  was,  perhaps,  the  most  ordinary 
sort  of  room  in  England  at  that  time,  but  it  struck  upon  the 
observant  minds  of  Joan  and  Peter  as  being  strange  and  re- 
markable. They  had  never  been  before  in  an  ordinary 
English  living-room.  It  was  a  small,  oblong  room  with  a 
faint  projection  towards  the  street,  as  if  it  had  attempted 
to  develop  a  bow  window  and  had  lacked  the  strength  to  do 
so.  On  one  side  was  a  fireplace  surmounted  by  a  mantelshelf 
and  an  "overmantel,"  an  affair  of  walnut-wood  with  a  num- 
ber of  patches  of  looking-glass  and  small  brackets  and  niches 
on  which  were  displayed  an  array  of  worthless  objects  made 
to  suggest  ornaments,  small  sham  bronzes,  shepherdesses, 
sham  Japanese  fans,  a  disjointed  German  pipe  and  the  like. 
In  the  midst  of  the  mantelshelf  stood  a  black  marble  clock 
insisting  fixedly  that  the  time  was  half-past  seven,  and  the 
mantelshelf  itself  and  the  fireplace  were  "draped"  with  a 
very  cheap  figured  muslin  that  one  might  well  have  sup- 
posed had  never  been  to  the  wash  except  for  the  fact  that  its 
pattern  was  so  manifestly  washed  out.  The  walls  were 
papered  with  a  florid  pink  wallpaper,  and  all  the  woodwork 
was  painted  a  dirty  brownish-yellow  colour  and  "grained" 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      151 

so  as  to  render  the  detection  of  dirt  impossible.  Small  as  this 
room  was  there  had  been  a  strenuous  and  successful  attempt 
to  obliterate  such  floor  space  as  it  contained  by  an  accumula- 
tion of  useless  furniture ;  there  were  flimsy  things  called 
whatnots  in  two  of  its  corners,  there  was  a  bulky  veneered 
mahogany  chiffonier  opposite  the  fireplace,  and  in  the  win- 
dow two  ferns  and  a  rubber  plant  in  wool-adorned  pots  died 
slowly  upon  a  rickety  table  of  bamboo.  The  walls  had 
been  a  basis  for  much  decorative  activity,  partly  it  would 
seem  to  conceal  or  minimize  a  mysterious  skin  disease  that 
affected  the  wallpaper,  but  partly  also  for  a  mere  perverse 
impulse  towards  litter.  There  were  weak  fret  work  brackets 
stuck  up  for  their  own  sakes  and  more  or  less  askew,  and 
stouter  brackets  entrusted  with  the  support  of  more  "orna- 
ments," small  bowls  and  a  tea-pot  that  valiantly  pretended 
they  were  things  of  beauty;  there  were  crossed  palm  fans, 
there  was  a  steel  engraving  of  Queen  Victoria  giving  the 
Bible  to  a  dusky  potentate  as  the  secret  of  England's  great- 
ness; there  was  "The  Soul's  Awakening,"  two  portraits  of 
George  and  May,  and  a  large  but  faded  photograph  of  the 
sea  front  at  Scarborough  in  an  Oxford  frame.  A  gas  ' '  chan- 
delier" descended  into  the  midst  of  this  apartment,  betray- 
ing a  confused  ornate  disposition  in  its  lines,  and  the  oblitera- 
tion of  the  floor  space  was  completed  by  a  number  of  black 
horsehair  chairs  and  a  large  table,  now  "laid"  with  a  worn 
and  greyish-white  cloth  for  a  meal.  Such  were  the  homes 
that  the  Victorian  age  had  evolved  by  the  million  in  England, 
and  to  such  nests  did  the  common  mind  of  the  British  resort 
when  it  wished  to  meditate  upon  the  problems  of  its  Imperial 
destiny.  Joan  and  Peter  surveyed  it  open-mouthed. 

The  table  was  laid  about  a  cruet  as  its  central  fact,  a  large, 
metallic  edifice  surmounted  by  a  ring  and  bearing  weary 
mustard,  spiritless  pepper,  faded  cayenne  pepper,  vinegar 
and  mysteries  in  bottles.  Joan  and  Peter  were  interested 
in  this  strange  object  and  at  the  same  time  vaguely  aware 
of  something  missing.  What  they  missed  were  flowers;  on 
this  table  there  were  no  flowers.  There  was  a  cold  joint,  a 
white  jug  of  beer  and  a  glass  jug  of  water,  and  pickles.  "I 
got  cold  meat,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus,  "not  being  sure  when  you 
were  coming."  She  arranged  her  guests.  But  she  did  not 


152  JOAN  AND  PETER 

immediately  begin.  She  had  had  an  idea.  She  regarded 
Peter. 

"Now,  Peter,"  she  said,  "let  me  'ear  you  say  Grice." 

Peter  wondered. 

"Say  Grice,  dearie." 

"Grice,"  said  Peter. 

The  young  man  with  the  red  hair  was  convulsed  with  mer- 
riment. "That's  good,"  he  said.  "That's  reely  Good. 
Kids  are  amusing." 

"But  I  tole  you  to  say  Grice,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus,  ruffled. 

"I  said  it." 

The  young  man's  voice  squeaked  as  he  explained.  "He 
doesn't  know  'ow  to  say  Grace,"  he  said.  "Never  'card  of 
it." 

"Is  it  a  catch?"  asked  Peter. 

The  young  man  caught  and  restrained  a  fresh  outburst  of 
merriment  with  the  back  of  his  hand,  and  then  explained 
again  to  Mrs.  Pybus. 

"  'E's  a  perfec'  little  'eathen,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus.  "I 
never  did.  They'll  teach  you  to  say  grice  all  right,  my  boy, 
before  you're  very  much  older.  Mark  my  words."  And 
with  a  sort  of  businesslike  reverence  Mrs.  Pybus  gabbled  her 
formula.  Then  she  proceeded  to  carve.  As  she  carved  she 
pursed  her  lips  and  frowned. 

The  cold  meat  was  not  bad,  but  the  children  ate  fastid- 
iously, and  Joan,  after  her  fashion,  left  all  her  fat.  This 
attracted  the  attention  of  Mrs.  Pybus.  ' '  Eat  it  up,  dearie, ' ' 
said  Mrs.  Pybus.  "Wiste  not,  want  not." 

"I  don 'teat  fat." 

"But  you  must  eat  fat,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus. 

Joan  shook  her  head. 

"We'll  'ave  to  teach  you  to  eat  fat,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus 
with  a  dangerous  gentleness.  For  the  time,  however,  the 
teaching  was  not  insisted  upon.  "Lovely  bits!  Enough  to 
feed  a  little  dog,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus,  as  she  removed  Joan's 
plate  to  make  way  for  apple  tart. 

The  conversation  was  intermittent.  It  was  as  if  they 
waited  for  some  further  event.  The  young  man  with  the 
red  hair  spoke  of  the  great  world  of  London  and  the  fun- 
eral of  Lord  Salisbury. 


"  'E  was  a  great  statesman,  say  what  you  like,"  said  the 
young  man  with  red  hair. 

He  also  spoke  of  Holbein 's  attempt  to  swim  the  channel. 

"They  say  'e  oils  'imself  all  over,"  said  the  young  man. 

"Lor' !"  said  Mrs.  Pybus. 

"It  can't  be  comfortable,"  said  the  young  man;  "say 
what  you  like." 

Presently  the  young  man  broke  a  silence  by  saying: 
''These  here  Balkans  seem  to  be  giving  trouble  again." 

"Troublesome  lot  they  are,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus. 

"Greeks  and  Macedonians  and  Turks  and  Bulgarians  and 
.such.  It  fair  makes  my  head  spin,  the  lot  of  them.  Servians 
there  are  too,  and  Montenegroes.  Too  many  of  'em  alto- 
gether. Cat  and  dog." 

"Are  them  the  same  Greeks  that  used  to  be  so  clever?" 
asked  Mrs.  Pybus. 

"Used  to  be,"  said  the  young  man  with  a  kind  of  dark 
scorn,  and  suddenly  began  to  pick  his  teeth  with  a  pin. 

"They  can't  even  speak  their  own  language  now — not 
properly.  Fair  rotten,"  the  young  man  added. 

He  fascinated  Joan.  She  had  never  watched  anything 
like  him.  But  Peter  just  hated  him. 


§  4 

Upon  this  scene  there  presently  appeared  a  new  actor.  He 
was  preluded  by  a  knocking  at  the  door,  he  was  ushered  in 
by  Mrs.  Pybus  who  was  opening  and  shutting  her  mouth  in 
a  state  of  breathless  respect;  he  was  received  with  the  ut- 
most deference  by  the  young  man  with  red  hair.  Indeed, 
from  the  moment  when  his  knocking  was  heard  without,  the 
manner  and  bearing  of  the  red-haired  young  man  under- 
went the  most  marvellous  change.  An  agitated  alacrity  ap- 
peared in  his  manner ;  he  stood  up  and  moved  nervously ;  by 
weak,  neckward  movements  of  his  head  he  seemed  to  indi- 
cate he  now  regretted  wearing  such  a  bright  green  tie.  The 
newcomer  appeared  in  the  doorway.  He  was  a  tall,  grey- 
clad,  fair  gentleman,  with  a  face  that  twitched  and  a  hand 
that  dandled  in  front  of  him.  He  grinned  his  teeth  at  the 


154  JOAN  AND  PETEE 

room.     "So  thassem,"  he  said,  touching  his  teeth  with  his 
thumbnail. 

He  nodded  confidentially  to  the  red-haired  young  man 
without  removing  his  eyes  from  Joan  and  Peter.  He  showed 
still  more  of  his  teeth  and  rattled  his  thumbnail  along  them. 
Then  he  waved  his  hand  over  the  table.  "Clear  all  this 
away,"  he  said,  and  sat  down  in  the  young  man's  chair. 
Mrs.  Pybus  cleared  away  rapidly,  assisted  abjectly  by  the 
young  man. 

Mr.  Grimes  seemed  to  check  off  the  two  children.  "You're 
Joan, "  he  said.  "I  needn't  bother  about  you.  You're  pro- 
vided for.  Peter.  Peter's  our  business." 

He  got  out  a  pocket-book  and  pencil.  "Let's  look  at  you, 
Peter.  Just  come  out  here,  will  you  ? ' ' 

Peter  obeyed  reluctantly  and  suspiciously. 

"No  stockings.  Don't  they  wear  stockings  at  that  school 
of  yours?" 

' '  Not  when  we  don 't  want  them, ' '  said  Peter.     ' '  No. ' ' 

"  'Mazes  me  you  wear  anything,"  said  Mr.  Grimes. 
"S'pose  it'll  come  to  that.  Let's  see  your  hat." 

"Haven't  got  a  hat,"  said  Peter.  "Wouldn't  wear  it  if 
I  had." 

"Wouldn't  you!"  said  Mr.  Grimes.     "H'm!" 

"Nice  little  handful,"  said  Mr.  Grimes,  and  hummed.  He 
produced  a  paper  from  the  pocket-book  and  read  it,  rubbing 
his  teeth  with  the  point  of  his  pencil. 

"Lersee  whassor  outfit  we  wan',"  said  Mr.  Grimes. 
"H'm.  .  .  .  H'm.  .  .  .  H'm.  .  .  ." 

He  stood  up  briskly.  "Well,  young  man,  we  must  go  out 
and  get  you  some  clothes  and  things.  What 's  called  a  school 
outfit.  We'll  have  to  go  in  that  motor-car  again.  Quickest 
way.  Get  your  hat.  But  you  haven't  got  a  hat." 

"Me  come  too,"  said  Joan. 

"Xo.  You  can't  come  to  a  tailor's,  and  that's  where 
we're  going.  Little  girls  can't  come  to  tailors,  you  know/' 
said  Mr.  Grimes. 

Peter  thought  privately  that  Mr.  Grimes  was  just  the 
sort  of  beast  who  would  take  you  to  a  tailor's.  Well,  he 
would  stick  it  out.  This  couldn't  go  on  for  ever.  He  al- 
lowed himself  to  be  guided  by  Mr.  Grimes  to  the  door.  He 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      155 

restrained  an  impulse  to  ask  to  be  allowed  to  sit  beside  the 
driver.  One  doesn't  ask  favours  of  beasts  like  Grimes. 

Joan  went  to  the  window  to  watch  the  car  and  Mr.  Grimes' 
proceedings  mistrustfully. 

"I  got  a  nice  picture-book  for  you  to  look  at,"  said  Mrs. 
Pybus,  coming  behind  her.  "Don't  go  standing  and  staring 
out  of  the  window,  dearie.  It's  an  idle  thing  to  stare  out 
of  windows. ' ' 

Joan  had  an  unpleasant  feeling  that  she  had  to  comply 
with  this.  Under  the  initiative  of  Mrs.  Pybus  she  sat  up  to 
the  table  and  permitted  a  large  book  to  be  opened  in  front  of 
her,  feigning  attention.  She  kept  her  eye  as  much  as  possi- 
ble on  the  window.  She  was  aware  of  Peter  getting  into  the 
car  with  Mr.  Grimes.  There  was  a  sudden  buzzing  of  ma- 
chinery, the  slam  of  a  door,  and  the  automobile  moved  and 
vanished. 

She  gave  a  divided  attention  to  the  picture-book  before 
her,  which  was  really  not  properly  a  picture-book  at  all  but 
an  old  bound  volume  of  the  Illustrated  London  News  full  of 
wood  engravings  of  royal  processions  and  suchlike  desiccated 
matter.  It  was  a  dusty,  frowsty  volume,  damp-stained  at 
the  edges.  She  tried  to  be  amused.  But  it  was  very  grey 
and  dull,  and  she  felt  strangely  uneasy.  Every  few  min- 
utes she  would  look  up  expecting  to  see  the  car  back  outside, 
but  it  did  not  return.  .  .  . 

She  heard  the  red-haired  young  man  in  the  passage  saying 
he  thought  he'd  have  to  be  getting  round  to  the  railway- 
station,  and  there  was  some  point  explained  by  Mrs.  Pybus  at 
great  length  and  over  and  over  again  about  the  difference  be- 
tween the  Great  Western  and  the  South  Western  Railway. 
The  front  door  slammed  after  him  at  last,  and  Mrs.  Pybus 
was  audible  returning  to  her  kitchen. 

Presently  she  came  and  looked  at  Joan  with  a  thin,  unreal 
smile  on  her  white  face. 

"Getting  on  all  right  with  the  pretty  pictures,  dearie?" 
she  asked. 

"When's  Peter  coming  back?"  asked  Joan. 

"Oh,  not  for  a  longish  bit,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus.  "You  see, 
he's  going  to  school." 

"Can  I  go  to  school?" 


156  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Not  'is  school.     He's  going  to  a  boy  school." 

"Oh!"  said  Joan,  learning  for  the  first  time  that  schools 
have  sexes.  "Can  I  go  out  in  the  garden?" 

"It  isn't  much  of  a  garden,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus.  "But 
what  there  is  you're  welcome." 

It  wasn't  much  of  a  garden.  Rather  it  was  a  yard,  into 
which  a  lean-to  scullery,  a  coal  shed,  and  a  dustbin  bit  deeply. 
Along  one  side  was  a  high  fence  cutting  it  off  from  a  similar 
yard,  and  against  this  high  fence  a  few  nasturtiums  gingered 
the  colour  scheme.  A  clothes-line  stretched  diagonally 
across  this  space  and  bore  a  depressed  pair  of  black  stock- 
ings, and  in  the  corner  at  the  far  end  a  lilac  bush  was  slowly 
but  steadily  and  successfully  wishing  itself  dead.  The  op- 
posite corner  was  devoted  to  a  collection  of  bottles,  the  ribs 
of  an  umbrella,  and  a  dust-pan  that  had  lost  its  handle. 
From  beneath  this  curious  rather  than  pleasing  accumulation 
peeped  the  skeleton  of  a  "rockery"  built  of  brick  clinkers 
and  free  from  vegetation  of  any  sort.  An  unseen  baby  a 
garden  or  two  away  deplored  its  existence  loudly.  At  inter- 
vals a  voice  that  sounded  like  the  voice  of  an  embittered  lit- 
tle girl  cut  across  these  lamentations: 

"Well,  you  shouldn't  'ave  broke  yer  bottle,"  said  the  voice, 
with  a  note  of  moral  demonstration.  .  .  . 

Joan  stayed  in  this  garden  for  exactly  three  minutes. 
Then  she  returned  to  Mrs.  Pybus,  who  was  engaged  in  some 
dim  operations  with  a  kettle  in  the  kitchen.  "Drat  this  old 
kitchener ! ' '  said  Mrs.  Pybus,  rattling  at  a  damper. 

"Want  to  go  'ome,"  Joan  said,  in  a  voice  that  betrayed 
emotion. 

Mrs.  Pybus  turned  her  meagre  face  and  surveyed  Joan 
without  excessive  tenderness. 

"This  is  your  'ome,  dearie,"  she  said. 

"I  live  at  Ingle-Nook, "  said  Joan. 

Mrs.  Pybus  shook  her  head.  "All  that's  been  done  away 
with,"  she  said.  "Your  aunts  'ave  give  you  up,  and  you're 
going  to  live  'ere  for  good — 'long  o'  me." 

§  5 

Meanwhile  Mr.  Grimes,  with  a  cheerful  kindliness  that 
Peter  perceived  to  be  assumed,  conveyed  that  young  gentle- 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       157 

man  first  to  an  outfitter,  where  he  was  subjected  to  nameless 
indignities  with  a  tape,  and  finally  sent  behind  a  screen 
and  told  to  change  out  of  his  nice,  comfortable  old  clothes 
and  Heidelberg  sandals  into  a  shirt  and  a  collar  and  a  grey 
flannel  suit,  and  hard  black  shoes.  All  of  which  he  did  in  a 
mute,  helpless  rage,  because  he  did  not  consider  himself  equal 
to  Mr.  Grimes  and  the  outfitter  and  his  staff  (with  possibly 
the  chauffeur  thrown  in)  in  open  combat.  He  was  then 
taken  to  a  hairdresser  and  severely  clipped,  which  struck  him 
as  a  more  sensible  proceeding ;  the  stuff  they  put  on  his  head 
was  indeed  pleasingly  aromatic;  and  then  he  was  bought 
some  foolery  of  towels  and  things,  and  finally  a  Bible  and 
a  prayer-book  and  a  box.  With  this  box  he  returned  to  the 
outfitter's,  and  was  quite  interested  in  discovering  that  a 
pile  of  things  had  accumulated  on  the  counter,  ties,  collars 
and  things,  and  were  to  be  packed  in  the  box  for  him  forth- 
with. A  junior  assistant  was  doing  up  his  Limpsfield  clothes 
in  a  separate  parcel.  So  do  we  put  off  childish  things.  That 
parcel  was  to  go  via  Mr.  Grimes  to  The  Ingle-Nook. 

A  memory  of  certain  beloved  sea  stories  came  into  Peter's 
head.  ''This  my  kit?"  he  asked  Mr.  Grimes  abruptly. 

"You  might  call  it  your  kit,"  said  Mr.  Grimes. 

"Am  I  going  on  a  battleship?"  asked  Peter. 

Mr.  Grimes — and  the  two  outfitting  assistants  in  sympathy 
— were  loudly  amused. 

"You're  going  to  High  Cross  School,"  said  Mr.  Grimes, 
emerging  from  his  mirth.  "Firm  treatment.  Sound 
Church  training.  Unruly  boys  not  objected  to." 

"I  didn't  know,"  said  Peter. 

They  returned  to  the  automobile,  and  after  a  mile  or  so  of 
roads  and  turnings  stopped  outside  a  gaunt  brace  of  drab- 
coloured  semi-detached  villas  standing  back  behind  a  patch 
of  lawn,  and  having  a  walled  enclosure  to  the  left  and  an 
overgrown  laurel  shrubbery  to  the  right.  "Here's  High 
Cross  School,"  said  Mr.  Grimes,  a  statement  that  was  ren- 
dered unnecessary  by  a  conspicuous  black  and  gold  board 
that  rose  above  the  walled  enclosure.  They  descended. 

"Wonther  which  ithe  houth, "  mused  Mr.  Grimes,  consult- 
ing his  teeth,  and  then  suddenly  decided  and  led  Peter  to- 
wards the  right  hand  of  the  two  associated  doors.  "This," 


158  JOAN  AND  PETER 

said  Mr.  Grimes,  as  they  waited  on  the  doorstep,  "is  a  real 
school.  .  .  .  No  nonsense  about  it,"  said  Mr.  Grimes. 

Peter  nodded  with  affected  intelligence. 

They  were  ushered  by  a  slatternly  maid-servant  into  the 
presence  of  a  baldish  man  with  a  white,  puffy  face  and  pale 
grey  eyes,  who  was  wearing  a  university  gown  and  seemed 
to  be  expecting  them.  He  was  standing  before  the  fireplace 
in  the  front  parlour,  which  had  a  general  air  of  being  a 
study.  There  were  an  untidy  desk  facing  the  window  and 
bookshelves  in  the  recess  on  either  side  of  the  fireplace.  Over 
the  mantel  was  a  tobacco- jar  bearing  the  arms  of  some  col- 
lege, and  reminders  of  Mr.  Mainwearing's  university  achieve- 
ments in  the  form  of  a  college  shield  and  Cambridge  photo- 
graphs. 

"Well,"  said  Mr.  Grimes,  "here's  your  young  man,"  and 
thrust  Peter  forward. 

"So  you've  come  to  join  us?"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing  with 
a  sort  of  clouded  amiability. 

"Join  what?"  said  Peter. 

Mr.  Mainwearing  raised  his  eyebrows.  "High  Cross 
School,"  he  said. 

"  I  'm  at  the  School  of  St.  George  and  the  Venerable  Bede, ' ' 
said  Peter.  "So  how  can  I?" 

"No,"  said  Mr.  Grimes;  "you're  joining  here  now." 

"But  I  can't  go  to  two  schools." 

"Consequently  you're  coming  to  this  one,"  said  Mr. 
Grimes. 

"It's  very  sudden,"  said  Peter. 

"What's  this  about  the  School  of  Saint  What 's-his-name ? " 
asked  Mr.  Mainwearing  of  Mr.  Grimes. 

"It's  just  a  sort  of  fad  school  they've  been  sending  him 
to,"  Mr.  Grimes  explained.  "We're  altering  all  that.  It's 
a  girls'  school,  and  he's  a  growing  boy.  It's  a  school  where 
socialism  and  play-acting  are  school  subjects,  and  everybody 
runs  about  with  next  to  nothing  on.  So  his  proper  guardians 
have  decided  that's  got  to  stop.  And  here  we  are." 

Mr.  Mainwearing  regarded  Peter  heavily  while  this  was 
going  on. 

"Done  any  square  root  yet?"  he  asked  suddenly. 

Peter  had  not. 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       159 

"Know  the  date  of  Magna  Carta?" 

Peter  did  not.     "It  was  under  John,"  he  said. 

' '  I  wanted  the  date, ' '  said  Mr.  Mainwearing.  ' '  What 's  the 
capital  of  Bulgaria?" 

Peter  did  not  know. 

"Know  any  French  irregular  verbs?" 

Peter  said  he  didn't. 

"Got  to  begin  at  the  beginning,"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing. 
"Got  your  outfit?" 

"We've  just  seen  to  that,"  said  Mr.  Grimes.  "There's 
one  or  two  things  I'd  like  to  say  to  you — " 

He  glanced  at  Peter. 

Mr.  Mainwearing  comprehended.  He  came  and  laid  one 
hand  on  Peter.  ' '  Time  you  saw  some  of  your  schoolfellows, ' ' 
he  said. 

Under  his  guiding  pressure  Peter  was  impelled  along  a 
passage,  through  an  archway,  across  an  empty  but  frowsty 
schoolroom  in  which  one  solitary  small  boy  sat  and  sobbed 
grievously,  and  so  by  way  of  another  passage  to  a  kind  of 
glass  back-door  from  which  steps  went  down  to  a  large 
gravelled  space,  behind  the  high  wall  that  carried  the  black 
and  gold  board.  In  the  corner  were  parallel  bars.  A  group 
of  nine  or  ten  boys  were  standing  round  these  bars;  they 
were  all  clad  in  the  same  sort  of  grey  flannels  that  Peter 
was  wearing,  and  they  had  all  started  round  at  the  sound 
of  the  opening  of  the  door.  One  shock-headed  boy,  perhaps 
a  head  taller  than  any  of  the  rest,  had  a  great  red  mouth  be- 
neath a  red  nose. 

"Boys!"  shouted  Mr.  Mainwearing;  "here's  a  new  chum. 
See  that  he  learns  his  way  about  a  bit,  Probyn." 

' '  Yessir ! ' '  said  the  shock-headed  boy  in  a  loud  adult  kind 
of  voice. 

Mr.  Mainwearing  gave  Peter  a  shove  that  started  him 
down  the  steps  towards  the  playground,  and  slammed  the 
door  behind  him. 

Most  of  these  boys  were  bigger  than  any  boys  that  Peter 
had  ever  known  before.  They  looked  enormous.  He 
reckoned  some  must  be  fifteen  or  sixteen — quite.  They  were 
as  big  as  the  biggest  Sheldrick  girl.  Probyn  seemed  indeed 
as  big  as  a  man ;  Peter  could  see  right  across  the  playground 


160  JOAN  AND  PETER 

that  he  had  a  black  smear  of  moustache.     His  neck  and  wrists 
and  elbows  stuck  out  of  his  clothes;. 

Peter  with  his  hands  in  his  new-found  pockets  walked 
slowly  towards  these  formidable  creatures  across  the  stony 
playground.  They  regarded  him  enigmatically.  So  explor- 
ers must  feel,  who  land  on  a  strange  beach  in  the  presence 
of  an  unknown  race  of  men. 

§  6 

' '  Come  on,  fathead ! ' '  said  Probyn  as  he  drew  near. 

Peter  had  expected  that  tone.     He  affected  indifference. 

"What's  your  name?"  asked  Probyn. 

"Stubland,"  said  Peter.     "You  Probyn?" 

"Stubland,"  said  Probyn.  "Stubland.  What's  your 
Christian  name?" 

"Peter.     What's  yours?" 

Probyn  disregarded  this  counter  question  markedly. 
"Simon  Peter,  eh!  Your  father  got  you  out  of  the  Bible, 
I  expect.  Know  anything  of  cricket,  Simon  Peter  ? ' ' 

"Not  much,"  said  Simon  Peter. 

"Can  you  swim?" 

"No." 

"Can  you  fight?" 

"I  don't  know." 

"What's  your  father?" 

Peter  didn  't  answer.  Instead,  he  fixed  his  attention  upon 
a  fair-haired  boy  of  about  his  own  size  who  was  standing 
at  the  end  of  the  parallel  bars.  "What's  your  name?"  he 
asked. 

The  fair  boy  looked  at  Probyn. 

"Damn  it!"  said  Probyn.  "I  asked  you  a  question,  Mr. 
Simon  Peter." 

Peter  continued  disregardful.  "Hasn't  this  school  got 
a  flagstaff?"  he  asked  generally. 

Probyn  came  closer  to  him  and  gripped  him  by  the  shoul- 
der. "I  asked  you  a  question,  Mr.  Simon  Peter.  What  is 
your  father?" 

It  was  a  question  Peter  could  not  answer  because  for  some 
obscure  reason  he  could  not  bring  himself  to  say  that  his 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL   161 

father  was  dead.  If  ever  he  said  that,  he  knew  his  father 
would  be  dead.  But  what  else  could  he  say  of  his  father? 
So  he  seemed  to  shrink  a  little  and  remained  mute.  "We'll 
have  to  cross-examine  you,"  said  Probyn,  and  shook  him. 

The  fair  boy  came  in  front  of  Peter.  It  was  clear  he  had 
great  confidence  in  Probyn.  He  had  a  fat,  smooth,  round 
face  that  Peter  disliked. 

"Simon  Peter,"  he  said.     "Answer  up." 

"What  is  your  father?"  said  Probyn. 

"What's  your  father?"  repeated  the  fair  boy,  and  then 
suddenly  nicked  Peter  under  the  nose  with  his  finger. 

But  this  did  at  least  enable  Peter  to  change  the  subject. 
He  smote  at  the  fat-faced  boy  with  great  vigour  and  missed 
him.  The  fat-faced  boy  dodged  back  quickly. 

"Hullo!"  said  Probyn.     "Ginger!" 

"That  chap's  not  going  to  touch  my  nose,"  said  Peter. 
"Anyhow." 

' '  Touch  it  when  I  like, ' '  said  the  fat-faced  boy. 

"You  won't." 

"You  want  to  fight?"  asked  the  fat-faced  boy,  conscious 
of  popular  support. 

Peter  said  lie  wasn't  going  to  have  his  nose  flicked  anyhow. 

"Flick  it  again,  Newton,"  said  Probyn,  "and  see." 

"I'll  show  you  in  no  time,"  said  Newton. 

"Why! — I'd  lick  you  with  one  hand,"  continued  Newton. 

Peter  said  nothing.  But  he  regarded  his  antagonist  very 
intently. 

"Skinny  little  snipe,"  said  Newton.  "Whaddyou  think 
you'd  do  to  me?" 

"Hit  him,  Newton,"  said  a  cadaverous  boy  with  freckles. 

"Hit  him,  Newton.  lie's  too  cocky,"  said  another. 
"Flick  his  silly  nose  again  and  see." 

"I'll  hit  him  'f'e  wants  it,"  said  Newton,  and  buttoned 
up  his  jacket  in  a  preparatory  way. 

"Hit  him,  Newton,"  other  voices  urged. 

"Let  him  put  up  his  fists,"  said  Newton. 

"Do  that  when  I  please,"  said  Peter  rather  faintly. 

Newton  had  seemed  at  first  just  about  Peter's  size.  Now 
he  seemed  very  much  larger.  All  the  boys  seemed  to  have 
grown  larger.  They  were  gathering  in  a  vast  circle  of  doom 


162  JOAN  AND  PETER 

round  a  minute  and  friendless  Peter.  Probyn  loomed  over 
him  like  a  figure  of  fate.  Peter  wondered  whether  he  need 
have  hit  at  Newton.  It  seemed  now  a  very  unwise  thing  in- 
deed to  have  done.  Newton  was  alternately  swaying  to- 
wards him  and  swaying  away  from  him,  and  repeating  his 
demand  for  Peter  to  put  his  hands  up.  He  seemed  on  the 
verge  of  flicking  again.  He  was  going  to  flick.  Probyn 
watched  them  both  critically.  Then  with  a  rapid  movement 
of  the  mind  Peter  realized  that  Newton's  face  was  swaying 
now  well  within  his  range;  the  moment  had  come,  and  des- 
perately, with  a  great  effort  and  a  wide  and  sweeping  move- 
ment of  the  arm,  he  smote  hard  at  Newton's  cheek.  Smack. 
A  good  blow.  Newton  recoiled  with  an  expression  of  as- 
tonishment. ' '  You — swine ! "  he  said. 

Two  other  boys  came  running  across  the  playground,  and 
voices  explained,  "New  boy.  .  .  .  Fight.  ..." 

But  curiously  enough  the  fight  did  not  go  on.  Newton  at 
a  slightly  greater  distance  continued  to  loom  threateningly, 
but  did  no  more  than  loom.  His  cheek  was  very  red.  "I'll 
break  your  jaw,  cutting  at  me  like  that,"  he  said.  "You 
swine!"  He  used  foul  and  novel  terms  expressive  of  rage. 
He  looked  at  Probyn  as  if  for  approval,  but  Probyn  offered 
none.  He  continued  to  threaten,  but  he  did  not  come  within 
arm's  length  again. 

"Hit  him  back,  Newton,"  several  voices  urged,  but  with 
no  success. 

"Wait  till  I  start  on  him,"  said  Newton. 

"Buck  up,  young  Newton,"  said  Probyn  suddenly,  "and 
stop  jawing.  You  began  it.  I'm  not  going  to  help  you. 
Make  a  ring,  you  chaps.  It's  a  fair  fight." 

Peter  found  himself  facing  Newton  in  the  centre  of  an 
interested  circle. 

Newton  was  walking  crab  fashion  athwart  the  circle,  sway- 
ing with  his  fists  and  elbows  high.  He  was  now  acting  a 
dangerous  intentness.  "Come  on,"  he  said  terribly. 

"Hit  him,  Newton,"  said  the  cadaverous  boy.  "Don't 
wait  for  him." 

"You  started  it,  Newton,"  Probyn  insisted.  "And  he's 
hit  you  fair." 

A  loud  familiar  sound,  the  clamorous  ringing  of  a  bell, 


THE  HIGH  CKOSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       163 

struck  across  the  suspended  drama.  "That's  tea,"  said 
Newton  eagerly,  dropping  his  lists.  "It's  no  good  starting 
on  him  now." 

"You'll  have  to  fight  him  later,"  said  Probyn.  "Now 
he's  hit  you." 

"It's  up  to  you,  Newton,"  said  the  cadaverous  boy,  evi- 
dently following  Probyn  ;s  lead. 

"Cave.     It's  Noser,"  said  a  voice. 

There  was  a  little  pause. 

"Toke!"  cried  Probyn. 

"Toke,  Simon  Peter,"  said  the  cadaverous  boy  inform- 
ingly.  .  .  . 

Peter  found  himself  no  longer  in  focus.  Every  one  was 
moving  towards  the  door  whence  Peter  had  descended  to 
the  playground,  and  at  this  door  there  now  stood  a  middle- 
aged  man  with  a  large  nose  and  a  sly  expression,  surveying 
the  boys. 

Impelled  by  gregarious  instincts,  Peter  followed  the  crowd. 

He  did  not  like  these  hostile  boys.  He  did  not  like  this 
shabby-looking  place.  He  was  quite  ready  to  believe  that 
presently  he  would  have  to  go  on  fighting  Newton.  He  was 
not  particularly  afraid  of  Newton,  but  he  perceived  that 
Probyu  stood  behind  him.  He  detested  Probyn  already. 
He  was  afraid  of  Probyn.  Probyn  was  like  a  golliwog.  He 
knew  by  instinct  that  Probyn  was  full  of  disagreeable  pos- 
sibilities for  him,  and  that  it  would  be  very  hard  to  get  away 
from  Probyn.  And  what  did  it  all  mean?  Was  he  never 
going  back  to  Limpstield  again? 

The  bell  had  had  exactly  the  tone  of  the  tea  bell  at  Miss 
Murgatroyd 's  school.  It  might  have  been  the  same  bell. 
And  it  had  made  his  heart  homesick  for  the  colour  and 
brightness  of  the  School  of  St.  George  and  the  Venerable 
Bede,  and  for  the  friendly  garden  and  familiar  rooms  of 
Ingle-Nook.  For  the  first  time  he  realized  that  he  had  fallen 
into  this  school  as  an  animal  falls  into  a  trap,  that  his  world 
had  changed,  that  home  was  very  far  away.  .  .  . 

And  what  had  they  done  to  Joan?  .  .  . 

Had  he  to  live  here  always?  .  .  . 

It  struck  Mr.  Noakley,  the  assistant  master  with  the  large 
nose,  as  he  watched  the  boys  at  tea,  that  the  new  boy  had  a 


164  JOAN  AND  PETER 

face  like  a  doll,  but  really  that  face  with  its  set,  shining,  ex- 
pressionless eyes  was  only  the  mask,  the  very  thin  mask,  that 
covered  a  violent  disposition  to  blubber.  .  .  . 

Well,  no  one  was  going  to  see  Peter  blub.     No  one  was 
going  to  hear  hiui  blub.  .  .  . 

Tonight  perhaps  in  bed. 

He  had  still  to  realize  the  publicity  of  a  school  dormi- 
tory. .  .  . 

He  knew  he  couldn't  box,  but  he  had  seen  something  in 
Newton's  eyes  that  made  him  feel  that  Newton  was  not  in- 
vincible. He  would  grip  his  fists  in  a  very  knobby  way  and 
hit  Xewton  as  hard  as  he  could  in  the  face.  Oh! — fright- 
fully hard.  .  .  . 

Peter  was  not  eating  very  much.  "Bags  I  your  slice  of 
Toke,"  said  the  cadaverous  boy. 

" Take  the  beastly  stuff,"  said  Peter. 

"Little  spoilt  mammy  coddle,"  thought  old  Nosey  Noak- 
ley.  "We  aren't  good  enough  for  him." 

§  7 

So  it  was  that  Mr.  Grimes,  acting  for  Lady  Charlotte,  set 
about  the  rescue  of  Joan  and  Peter  from,  as  she  put  it,  "the 
freaks,  faddists  and  Hill-Top  philosophies  of  the  Surrey 
hills,"  and  their  restoration  to  the  established  sobrieties  and 
decorums  of  English  life.  \rery  naturally  this  sudden  ac- 
tion came  as  an  astonishing  blow  to  the  two  advanced  aunts. 
At  nine  o'clock  that  evening  Miss  Murgatroyd  was  called 
down  to  see  Miss  Phyllis  Stubland,  who  had  ridden  over  on 
her  bicycle.  "Where  are  the  children?"  asked  Aunt  Phyllis. 

"You  sent  for  them,"  said  Miss  Murgatroyd. 

"Sent  for  them!" 

"Yes.  I  remember  now.  The  young  man  said  it  was 
Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham.  Didn't  you  know?  She  is  go- 
ing abroad  tomorrow  or  the  next  day." 

"Sent  for  them!"  Aunt  Phyllis  repeated.  .  .  . 

Two  hours  later  Aunt  Phyllis  was  telling  the  terrible  news 
to  Mary.  Aunt  Phrebe  was  in  London  for  the  night  to  see 
Mr.  Tree  play  Richard  II,  and  there  were  no  means  of  com- 
municating with  her  until  the  morning.  The  Ingle-Nook  was 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      165 

much  too  Pre-Raphaelite  to  possess  a  telephone,  and  Aunt 
Phoebe  was  sleeping  at  the  flat  of  a  friend  in  Church  Row, 
Hampstead.  Next  morning  a  telegram  found  her  still  in  bed. 

"Children  kidnapped  by  Lady  Charlotte  consult  Sycamore  Phyllis" 

said  the  telegram. 

"No!"  cried  Aunt  Phoebe  sharply. 

Then  as  the  little  servant-maid  was  on  the  point  of  closing 
the  door,  "Tell  Miss  Jepson, "  Aunt  Phoebe  commanded.  .  .  . 

Miss  Jepson  found  Aunt  Phcebe  out  of  bed  and  dressing 
with  a  rapid  casualness.  It  was  manifest  that  some  great 
crisis  had  happened.  "An  outrage  upon  all  women,"  said 
Aunt  Phoebe.  "I  have  been  outraged." 

"My  dear!"  said  Miss  Jepson. 

"Read  that  telegram!"  cried  Aunt  Phoebe,  pointing  to 
a  small  ball  of  pink  paper  in  the  corner  of  the  room. 

Miss  Jepson  went  over  to  the  corner  with  a  perplexed 
expression,  and  smoothed  out  the  telegram  and  read  it. 

"A  Bradshaw  and  a  hansom!"  Aunt  Phoebe  was  de- 
manding as  she  moved  rapidly  about  the  room  from  one  scat- 
tered garment  to  another.  "No  breakfast.  I  can  eat  noth- 
ing. Nothing.  I  am  a  tigress.  A  maddened  tigress. 
Maddened.  Beyond  endurance.  Oh !  Can  you  reach  these 
buttons,  dear?" 

Miss  Jepson  hovered  about  her  guest  readjusting  her  cos- 
tume in  accordance  with  commonplace  standards  while  Aunt 
Phoebe  expressed  herself  in  Sibylline  utterances. 

"Children  dedicated  to  the  future.  .  .  .  Reek  of  ancient 
corruptions.  .  .  .  Abomination  of  desolation.  .  .  .  The  nine 
fifty-three.  .  .  .  Say  half  an  hour.  .  .  .  Remonstrance.  .  .  . 
An  avenging  sword.  .  .  .  The  sword  of  the  Lord  and  of  Gid- 
eon." 

"Are  you  going  to  this  Mr.  Sycamore?"  asked  Miss  Jep- 
son suddenly. 

Aunt  Phoebe  seemed  lost  for  a  time  and  emerged  with, 
"Good  God! — Xo!  This  is  an  occasion  when  a  woman  must 
show  she  can  act  as  a  man.  This  tries  us,  Amanda.  I  will 
have  no  man  in  this.  No  man  at  all !  Are  women  to  loll  in 
hareems  for  ever  while  men  act  and  fight?  When  little  chil- 
dren are  assailed?  .  ." 


166  JOAN  AND  PETER 

' '  Chastlands, "  said  Aunt  Phoebe  to  the  cabman,  waving 
Miss  Jepson  's  Bradshaw  in  her  hand. 

The  man  looked  stupid. 

"Oh!  Charing  Cross,"  she  cried  scornfully.  "The  rest 
is  beyond  you." 

And  in  the  train  she  startled  her  sole  fellow-traveller  and 
made  him  get  out  at  the  next  station  by  saying  suddenly 
twice  over  in  her  loud,  clear  contralto  voice  the  one  word 
"Action."  She  left  Miss  Jepson 's  Bradshaiv  in  the  com- 
partment when  she  got  out. 

She  found  Chastlands  far  gone  in  packing  for  Lady  Char- 
lotte's  flight  abroad.  "I  demand  Lady  Charlotte,"  she 
said.  She  followed  up  old  Cashel  as  he  went  to  announce 
her.  He  heard  her  coming  behind  him,  but  his  impression 
of  her  was  so  vivid  that  he  deemed  it  wiser  not  to  notice  this 
informality.  And  besides  in  his  dry,  thin  way  he  wanted  to 
hear  why  she  demanded  Lady  Charlotte.  He  perceived  the 
possibilities  of  a  memorable  clash.  He  was  a  quiet,  con- 
templative man  who  hid  his  humour  like  a  miser's  treasure 
and  lived  much  upon  his  memories.  Weeks  after  a  thing 
had  happened  he  would  suddenly  titter,  in  bed,  or  in  church, 
or  while  he  was  cleaning  his  plate.  And  none  were  told 
why  he  tittered. 

For  a  moment  Aunt  Phoebe  hovered  on  the  landing  outside 
the  Chastlands  drawing-room. 

"I  can't  see  her,"  she  heard  Lady  Charlotte  say,  with 
something  like  a  note  of  terror.  "It  is  impossible." 

"Leave  her  to  me,  me  Lady,"  said  a  man's  voice. 

"Tell  her  to  wait,  Cashel,"  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

Aunt  Phoebe  entered,  trailing  her  artistic  robes.  Before 
her  by  the  writing-table  in  the  big  window  stood  Lady  Char- 
lotte, flounced,  bonneted,  dressed  as  if  for  instant  flight.  A 
slender,  fair,  wincing  man  in  grey  stood  nearer,  his  expres- 
sion agitated  but  formidable.  They  had  evidently  both 
risen  to  their  feet  as  Aunt  Phoebe  entered.  Cashel  made 
insincere  demonstrations  of  intervention,  but  Aunt  Phoebe 
disposed  of  him  with  a  gesture.  A  haughty  and  terrible  po- 
liteness was  in  her  manner,  but  she  sobbed  slightly  as  she 
spoke. 

"Lady  Charlotte,"  she  said,  "where  are  my  wards?" 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      167 

"They  are  my  wards,"  said  Lady  Charlotte  no  less 
haughtily. 

"Excuse  me,  Lady  Charlotte.  Permit  me,"  said  Mr. 
Grimes,  with  soothing  gestures  of  his  lean  white  hands. 

"Please  do  not  intervene,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe. 

"Mr.  Grimes,  madam,  is  my  solicitor,"  said  Lady  Char- 
lotte. "You  may  go,  Cashel." 

Cashel  went  reluctantly. 

Mr.  Grimes  advanced  a  step  and  dandled  his  hands  and 
smiled  ingratiatingly.  Italian  and  Spanish  women  will  stab, 
he  had  heard,  and  fishwives  are  a  violent  class.  Otherwise 
he  believed  all  women,  however  terrible  in  appearance,  to  be 
harmless.  This  gave  him  courage. 

"Miss  Stubland,  I  believe,"  he  said.  "These  young  peo- 
ple, young  Stubland  and  his  foster-sister  to  wit,  are  at  pres- 
ent in  my  charge — under  instructions  from  Lady  Char- 
lotte." 

"Where?"  asked  Aunt  Phoebe. 

"Our  case,  Miss  Stubland,  is  that  they  were  not  being  prop- 
erly educated  in  your  charge.  That  is  our  case.  They  were 
receiving  no  sound  moral  and  religious  training,  and  they 
were  being  brought  up  in — to  say  the  least  of  it — an  eccentric 
fashion.  Our  aim  in  taking  them  out  of  your  charge  is  to 
secure  for  them  a  proper  ordinary  English  bringing  up." 

"Every  word  an  insult,"  panted  Aunt  Phoebe.  "Every 
word.  What  have  you  done  with  them?" 

"Until  we  are  satisfied  that  you  will  consent  to  continue 
their  training  on  proper  lines.  Miss  Stubland,  you  can 
scarcely  expect  us  to  put  it  in  your  power  to  annoy  these 
poor  children  further." 

Mr.  Grimes'  face  was  wincing  much  more  than  usual,  and 
these  involuntary  grimaces  affected  Aunt  Phoebe  in  her  pres- 
ent mood  as  though  they  wrere  deliberate  insults.  He  did  not 
allow  for  this  added  exasperation. 

"Annoy!"  cried  Aunt  Phoebe. 

"That  is  the  usual  expression.  We  are  perfectly  within 
our  rights  in  refusing  you  access.  Having  regard  to  your 
manifest  determination  to  upset  any  proper  arrangement." 

"You  refuse  to  let  me  know  where  those  children  are?" 

"Unless  you  can  get  an  order  against  us." 


168  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"You  mean — go  to  some  old  judge?" 

Mr.  Grimes  gesticulated  assent.  If  she  chose  to  phrase  it 
in  that  way,  so  much  the  worse  for  her  application. 

"You  won't You  will  go  on  with  this  kidnap- 
ping?" 

"Miss  Stubland,  we  are  entirely  satisfied  with  our  present 
course  and  our  present  position." 

Lady  Charlotte  endorsed  him  with  three  great  nods. 

Aunt  Phoebe  stood  aghast. 

Mr.  Grimes  remained  quietly  triumphant.  Lady  Char- 
lotte stood  quietly  triumphant  behind  him.  For  a  moment 
it  seemed  as  if  Aunt  Phoebe  had  no  reply  of  any  sort  to  make. 

Then  suddenly  she  advanced  three  steps  and  seized  upon 
Mr.  Grimes.  One  hand  gripped  his  nice  grey  coat  below 
the  collar  behind,  the  other,  the  looseness  of  his  waistcoat 
just  below  the  tie.  And  lifting  him  up  upon  his  toes  Aunt 
Phoebe  shook  him. 

Mr.  Grimes  was  a  lean,  spare,  ironical  man.  Aunt  Phcebe 
was  a  well-developed  woman.  Yet  only  by  an  enormous 
effort  did  she  break  the  instinctive  barriers  that  make  a  man 
sacred  from  feminine  assault.  It  was  an  effort  so  enormous 
that  when  at  last  it  broke  down  the  dam  of  self-restraint,  it 
came  through  a  boiling  flood  of  physical  power.  It  came 
through  with  a  sort  of  instantaneousness.  At  one  moment 
Mr.  Grimes  stood  before  Lady  Charlotte's  eyes  dominating 
the  scene;  at  the  next  he  was,  as  materialists  say  of  the 
universe,  "all  vibrations."  He  was  a  rag,  he  was  a  scrap 
of  carpet  in  Aunt  Phoebe's  hands.  The  appetite  for  shaking 
seemed  to  grow  in  Aunt  Phoebe  as  she  shook. 

From  the  moment  when  Aunt  Phcebe  gripped  him  until 
she  had  done  shaking  him  nobody  except  Lady  Charlotte 
made  an  articulate  sound.  And  all  that  Lady  Charlotte 
said,  before  astonishment  overcame  her,  was  one  loud 
"Haw!"  The  face  of  Mr.  Grimes  remained  set,  except  for  a 
certain  mechanical  rattling  of  the  teeth  in  a  wild  stare  at 
Aunt  Phoebe;  Aunt  Phrebe's  features  bore  that  earnest  calm 
one  may  see  upon  the  face  of  a  good  woman  who  washes 
clothes  or  kneads  bread.  Then  suddenly  it  was  as  if  Aunt 
Phcebe  woke  up  out  of  a  trance. 

"You  make — you  make  me  forget  myself!"  said  Aunt 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      169 

Phoebe  with  a  low  sob,  and  after  one  last  shake  relinquished 
him. 

Mr.  Grimes  gyrated  for  a  moment  and  came  to  rest  against 
a  massive  table.  He  was  still  staring  at  Aunt  Phoebe. 

For  a  moment  the  three  people  remained  breathing  heavily 
and  contemplating  the  outrage.  At  last  Mr.  Grimes  was  able 
to  raise  a  wavering,  pointing  finger  to  gasp,  ' '  You  have — you 
have — yes — indeed — forgotten  yourself ! ' ' 

Then,  as  if  he  struggled  to  apprehend  the  position,  "You 
— you  have  assaulted  me." 

' '  Let  it  be — let  it  be  a  warning  to  you, ' '  said  Aunt  Phoebe. 

"That  is  a  threat." 

"Agreed,"  panted  Aunt  Phoebe  with  spirit,  though  she 
had  not  meant  to  threaten  him  at  all. 

"If  you  think,  madam,  that  you  can  assault  me  with  im- 
punity  " 

"I  shouldn't  have  thought  it — before  I  took  hold  of  you. 
A  bag  of  bones.  .  .  .  Man  indeed!"  And  then  very  ear- 
nestly— "  Yes. " 

She  paused.     The  pause  held  all  three  of  them  still. 

"But  why — oh,  why! — should  I  bandy  words  with  such 
a  thing  as  you?"  she  asked  with  a  sudden  belated  recovery 
of  her  dignity.  "You — " 

She  sought  her  word  carefully. 

"Flibber-gib!" 

And  forgetting  altogether  the  mission  upon  which  she  had 
come,  Aunt  Phoebe  turned  about  to  make  her  exit  from  the 
scene.  It  seemed  to  her,  perhaps  justly,  that  it  was  impos- 
sible to  continue  the  parley  further.  ' '  Legalized  scoundrel ! ' ' 
she  said  over  her  shoulder,  and  moved  towards  the  door.  In 
that  first  tremendous  clash  of  the  New  Woman  and  the  Ter- 
rific Old  Lady,  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  New  Woman 
carried  off,  so  to  speak,  the  physical  honours.  Lady  Char- 
lotte stood  against  the  fireplace  visibly  appalled.  Only  when 
Aunt  Phoebe  was  already  at  the  door  did  it  occur  to  Lady 
Charlotte  to  ring  the  bell  to  have  her  visitor  "shown  out." 
Her  shaking  hand  could  scarcely  find  the  bell  handle.  For 
the  rest  she  was  ineffective,  wasting  great  opportunities  for 
scorn  and  dignity.  She  despised  herself  for  not  having 
a  larger,  fiercer  solicitor.  She  doubted  herself.  For  the 


170  JOAN  AND  PETER 

first  time  in  her  life  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  doubted  her- 
self, and  quailed  before  a  new  birth  of  time. 

Upon  the  lauding  appeared  old  Cashel,  mutely  respectful. 
He  showed  out  Aunt  Phoebe  in  profound  silence.  He 
watched  her  retreating  form  with  affectionate  respect,  strok- 
ing his  cheek  slowly  with  two  fingers.  He  closed  the  door. 

He  stood  as  one  who  seeks  to  remember.  "Flibber-jib,"  he 
said  at  last  very  softly,  without  exultation  or  disapproval. 
He  simply  wanted  to  have  it  exactly  right.  Then  he  went 
upstairs  to  have  a  long,  mild,  respectful  look  at  Mr.  Grimes, 
and  to  ask  if  he  could  do  anything  for  him.  .  .  . 

§  8 

Aunt  Phoebe's  return  to  The  Ingle-Nook  blended  triumph 
and  perplexity. 

"I  could  never  have  imagined  a  man  so  flimsy,"  she  said. 

"But  where  are  the  children?"  asked  Aunt  Phyllis. 

"If  all  men  are  like  him — then  masculine  ascendancy  is  an 
imposture." 

("Yes,  but  where  are  the  children?") 

"So  a  baulked  tigress  might  feel." 

Aunt  Phyllis  decided  to  write  to  Mr.  Sycamore. 

§  9 

Mr.  Mainwearing  was  the  proprietor  of  a  private  school 
for  young  gentlemen,  not  by  choice  but  by  reason  of  the  weak- 
nesses of  his  character.  It  was  card-playing  more  than  any- 
thing else  that  had  made  him  an  educator.  And  it  was 
vanity  and  the  want  of  any  sense  of  proportion  that  had  led 
to  the  card-playing. 

Mr.  Main  wearing 's  father  had  been  a  severe  parent,  severe 
to  the  pitch  of  hostility.  He  had  lost  his  wife  early,  and  he 
had  taken  a  grudge  against  his  only  son,  whose  looks  he  did 
not  like.  He  had  sent  him  to  Cambridge  with  a  bitter  assur- 
ance that  he  would  do  no  good  there;  had  kept  him  too  short 
of  money  to  be  comfortable,  spent  most  of  his  property — he 
was  a  retired  tea-broker — in  disappointing  and  embittering 
jaunts  into  vice,  and  died  suddenly,  leaving — unwillingly, 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      171 

but  lie  had  to  leave  it — about  three  thousand  pounds  to  his 
heir.  Young  Mainwearing  had  always  been  short  of  pocket- 
money,  and  for  a  time  he  regarded  this  legacy  as  limitless 
wealth ;  he  flashed  from  dingy  obscurity  into  splendour,  got 
himself  coloured  shirts  and  remarkable  ties,  sought  the  ac- 
quaintance of  horses,  slipped  down  to  London  for  music-halls 
and  "life."  When  it  dawned  upon  him  that  even  three 
thousand  pounds  was  not  a  limitless  ocean  of  money,  he  at- 
tempted to  maintain  its  level  by  winning  more  from  his  fel- 
low undergraduates.  Nap  and  poker  were  the  particular 
forms  of  sport  he  affected.  He  reckoned  that  he  was,  in  a 
quiet  way,  rather  cleverer  than  most  fellows,  and  that  he 
would  win.  But  he  was  out  in  his  reckoning.  He  left  Cam- 
bridge with  a  Junior  Optime  in  the  Mathematical  Tripos  and 
a  residuum  of  about  seven  hundred  pounds.  He  was  a  care- 
ful cricketer,  and  he  had  liked  football  at  school  in  his  con- 
cluding years  when  he  was  big  enough  to  barge  into  the 
other  chaps.  Surveying  the  prospect  before  him,  he  decided 
that  a  school  was  the  best  place  for  him,  he  advertised  himself 
as  "of  gentlemanly  appearance"  and  "good  at  games,"  and 
he  found  his  billet  in  a  preparatory  school  at  Brighton. 
Thence  he  went  to  a  big  grammar  school,  and  thence  came 
to  the  High  Cross  School  to  remain  first  as  assistant,  then  as 
son-in-law  and  partner,  and  now  as  sole  proprietor.  Mrs. 
Mainwearing  was  not  very  useful  as  a  helpmeet,  as  she  was 
slightly  but  not  offensively  defective  in  her  mind ;  still  one 
must  take  life  as  one  finds  it.  She  was,  at  any  rate,  regu- 
lar in  her  habits,  and  did  not  interfere  with  the  housekeeper, 
a  worthy,  confidence-creating  woman,  much  tipped  by  the 
tenderer  sort  of  parent. 

Of  course  Mr.  Mainwearing  had  no  special  training  as  a 
teacher.  He  had  no  ideas  about  education  at  all.  He  had 
no  social  philosophy.  He  had  never  asked  why  he  was  alive 
or  what  he  was  up  to.  Instinct,  perhaps,  warned  him  that 
the  answer  might  be  disagreeable.  Much  less  did  he  inquire 
what  his  boys  were  likely  to  be  up  to.  And  it  did  not  occur 
to  him,  it  did  not  occur  to  any  one  in  those  days,  to  consider 
that  these  deficiencies  barred  him  in  any  way  from  the 
preparation  of  the  genteel  young  for  life.  He  taught  as  he 
had  been  taught ;  his  teachers  had  done  the  same ;  he  was 


172  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  last  link  of  a  long  chain  of  tradition  that  had  perhaps 
in  the  beginning  had  some  element  of  intention  in  it  as 
to  what  was  to  be  made  of  the  pupil.  Schools,  like  religions, 
tend  perpetually  to  forget  what  they  are  for.  High  Cross 
School,  like  numberless  schools  in  Great  Britain  in  those  days, 
had  forgotten  completely ;  it  was  a  mysterious  fated  routine ; 
the  underlying  idea  seemed  to  be  that  boys  must  go  to 
school  as  puppies  have  the  mange.  Certain  school  books 
existed,  God  alone  knew  why,  and  the  classes  were  taken 
through  them.  It  was  like  reading  prayers.  Certain  ex- 
amination boards  checked  this  process  in  a  way  that  Mr. 
Mainwearing  felt  reflected  upon  his  honour,  and  like  all 
fundamentally  dishonest  people  he  was  inclined  to  be  touchy 
about  his  honour.  But  parents  wanted  examination  results 
and  he  had  to  give  in.  Preparation  for  examinations  dom- 
inated the  school ;  no  work  was  done  in  the  school  that  did 
not  lead  towards  an  examination  paper;  if  there  had  been 
no  examinations,  no  work  would  have  been  done  at  all.  But 
ihese  examinations  might  have  been  worse  than  they  were. 
•The  examiners  were  experienced  teachers  and  considerate 
for  their  kind.  They  respected  the  great  routine.  The  ex- 
aminers in  classics  had,  at  best,  Babu  Latin  and  less  Greek, 
and  so  they  knew  quite  well  how  to  set  a  paper  that  would 
enable  the  intelligent  candidate  to  conceal  an  entire  inca- 
pacity for  reading,  writing,  or  speaking  a  classical  language ; 
the  examiners  in  mathematics  knew  nothing  of  practical  cal- 
culations, and  treated  the  subject  as  a  sort  of  Patience  game ; 
-the  foreign  language  examiners  stuck  loyally  to  the  gram- 
mar; in  drawing  the  examiners  asked  you  to  copy  "copies," 
they  did  not,  at  any  rate,  require  you  to  draw  things;  and 
altogether  the  "curse  of  examinations"  might  have  pressed 
on  Mr.  Mainwearing  harder  than  it  did.  Suppose  the  lan- 
guage papers  had  been  just  long  passages  to  translate  into 
and  out  of  English,  and  that  the  mathematical  test  had  been 
all  problems,  and  the  drawing  test  had  been  a  test  of  draw- 
ing anything!  What  school  could  have  stood  the  strain? 

To  assist  him  in  the  work  of  his  school  Mr.  Mainwearing 
had  gathered  about  him  a  staff  of  three.  He  had  found  a 
young  man  rather  of  his  own  social  quality,  but  very  timid, 
a  B.A.  Caatab.  by  way  of  the  botanical  special;  then  there 


was  Noakley,  a  rather  older,  sly  creature,  with  a  large  over- 
balancing nose,  who  had  failed  to  qualify  years  ago  as  an 
elementary  assistant  school-master  and  so  had  strayed  into 
the  uncharted  and  uncertificated  ways  of  a  private  school; 
and  finally  there  was  Kahn,  an  Alsatian,  who  taught  lan- 
guages and  the  piano.  With  these  three  and  the  active  as- 
sistance of  Mrs.  Rich,  the  housekeeper,  the  school  maintained 
its  sluggish  routines. 

The  boys  slept  in  two  long  rooms  that  had  been  made 
Dy  knocking  through  partitions  in  the  two  upper  floors,  and 
converted  into  dormitories  by  the  simple  expedient  of  crowd- 
ing them  with  iron  bedsteads  and  small  chests  of  drawers. 
It  was  the  business  of  Xoakley — who  had  a  separate  room  on 
the  top  floor — to  arouse  the  boys  at  seven  with  cries  and 
violence  for  the  business  of  the  day.  But  there  was  a  tacit 
understanding  between  him  and  the  boys  not  to  molest  each 
other  until  about  twenty  minutes  past. 

It  was  a  rule,  established  by  Mr.  Mainwearing  in  a  phase 
of  hygienic  enthusiasm  some  years  before,  that  on  fine  morn- 
ings throughout  the  year  the  boys  should  go  for  a  sharp 
run  before  breakfast.  It  was  a  modern  and  impressive  thing 
to  do  and  it  cost  him  nothing.  It  was  Noakley 's  duty  to 
accompany  them  on  this  run.  He  was  unable  to  imagine  any 
more  loathsome  duty.  So  that  he  had  invented  a  method 
of  supplementing  the  rains  of  heaven  by  means  of  a  private 
watering-pot.  His  room  was  directly  above  Mr.  Mainwear- 
ing's,  and  Mr.  Mainwearing  slept  with  his  window  shut  and 
his  blinds  down,  and  about  seven-fifteen  or  so  every  morning 
the  curious  passer-by  might  have  seen  a  lean,  sly  man  with 
an  enormous  nose,  his  mouth  wide  open  and  his  tongue  out 
with  effort,  leaning  far  out  of  an  upper  bedroom  of  High 
Cross  School  and  industriously  and  carefully  watering  the 
window  and  window-sill  of  the  room  two  storeys  below  him. 
Later,  perhaps,  a  patient  observer  might  have  been  re- 
warded by  the  raising  of  Mr.  Mainwearing 's  blind  and  a 
glimpse  of  Mr.  Mainwearing,  unshaven  and  in  a  white  cot- 
ton nightgown,  glancing  out  at  the  weather.  .  .  . 

So  generally  the  morning  began  with  a  tedious,  sticky, 
still  sleepy  hour  called  Early  Prep,  in  the  schoolroom  on  the 
ground  floor.  It  was  only  during  Kahn's  alternate  week  of 


174  JOAN  AND  PETER 

morning  duty  that  the  run  ever  occurred.  Then  it  wasn't  a 
run.  It  began  as  a  run  and  settled  down  as  soon  as  it  was 
out  of  sight  of  the  school  to  a  sulky  walk  and  a  muttered 
monologue  by  Kahn  in  German — he  never  spoke  any  lan- 
guage but  German  before  breakfast — about  his  "magen." 

Noakley's  method  in  early  prep,  was  to  sit  as  near  to 
the  fire  as  possible  in  the  winter  and  at  the  high  desk  in 
summer,  and  to  leave  the  boys  alone  so  long  as  they  left  him 
alone.  They  conversed  in  undertones,  made  and  threw  paper 
darts  at  one  another,  read  forbidden  fiction,  and  so  forth. 
Breakfast  at  half-past  eight  released  them,  and  there  was  a 
spell  of  playground  before  morning  school  at  half-past  nine. 
At  half-past  nine  Mr.  Mainwearing  and  Mr.  Smithers,  the 
botanical  Cantab,  appeared  in  the  world,  gowned  and  a  little 
irritable,  and  prayers  and  scripture  inaugurated  the  official 
day.  Mr.  Mainwearing 's  connexion  was  a  sound  Church  con- 
nexion, and  he  opened  the  day  with  an  abbreviated  Matins 
and  the  collect  and  lessons  for  the  day.  Then  the  junior 
half  of  the  school  went  upstairs  to  the  second  class-room  with 
Mr.  Smithers,  while  Mr.  Mainwearing  dealt  tediously  with 
Chronicles  or  Kings.  Meanwhile  Kahn  and  Noakley  cor- 
rected exercise-books  in  the  third  class-room,  and  waited  their 
time  to  take  up  their  part  in  the  great  task  of  building  up 
the  British  imperial  mind.  By  eleven  o'clock  each  of  the 
four  class-rooms  was  thoroughly  stuffy  and  the  school  was  in 
full  swing;  Mr.  Mainwearing,  who  could  not  have  translated 
a  new  satire  by  Juvenal  to  save  his  life,  was  "teaching" 
Greek  or  Latin  or  history,  Mr.  Smithers  was  setting  or  ex- 
plaining exercises  on  the  way  to  quadratic  equations  or  Eu- 
clid Book  II.,  which  were  the  culminating  points  of  High 
Cross  mathematics ;  Kahn,  hoarse  with  loud  anger,  was  mak- 
ing a  personal  quarrel  of  the  French  class;  and  Noakley  was 
gently  setting  the  feet  of  the  younger  boys  astray  in  geog- 
raphy or  arithmetic  or  parsing.  This  was  the  high-water 
mark  of  the  day's  effort. 

After  the  midday  dinner,  which  was  greasy  and  with  much 
too  much  potato  in  it,  came  a  visible  decline.  In  the  after- 
noon Mr.  Mainwearing  would  start  a  class  upon  some  sort  of 
exercises,  delegate  Probyn  to  keep  order,  and  retire  to  slum- 
ber in  his  study ;  Smithers  and  Kahn,  who  both  suffered  from 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       175 

indigestion,  would  quarrel  bitterly  with  boys  they  disliked 
and  inflict  punishments ;  Noakley  would  sleep  quietly  through 
a  drawing  class  on  the  tacit  understanding  that  there  was  no 
audible  misbehaviour,  and  that  the  boys  would  awaken  him 
if  they  heard  Mr.  Mainwearing  coming. 

Mr.  Mainwearing,  when  he  came,  usually  came  viciously. 
He  would  awaken  in  an  evil  temper  and  sit  cursing  his  life 
for  some  time  before  he  could  rouse  himself  to  a  return 
to  duty.  He  would  suddenly  become  filled  with  suspicions, 
about  the  behaviour  of  the  boys  or  the  worthiness  of  his 
assistants.  He  would  take  his  cane  and  return  with  a  heavy 
scowl  on  his  face  through  the  archway  to  his  abandoned  class. 

He  would  hear  a  murmur  of  disorder,  a  squeak  of  "cave!" 
and  a  hush. 

Or  he  would  hear  Probyn  's  loud  bellow :  ' '  Shut  up,  young 
Pyecrof t.  Shut  it,  I  say  ! — or  I  '11  report  you ! ' ' 

He  would  appear  threateningly  in  the  doorway. 

"What's  he  doing,  Probyn?"  he  would  ask.  "What's  he 
doing?" 

"Humbugging  about,  Sir.  He's  always  humbugging 
about." 

The  diffused  wrath  of  Mr.  Mainwearing  would  gather  to  a 
focus.  If  there  were  no  little  beasts  like  young  Pyecroft  he 
wouldn't  be  in  this  infernal,  dull,  dreary  hole  of  a  school. 

"I'll  teach  you  to  humbug  about,  Pyecroft,"  he  would  say. 
"Come  out,  Sir!" 

"Please,  Sir!" 

Roar.  ' '  Don 't  ~bandy  words  with  me,  you  little  Hound  ! 
Come  out,  I  say!" 

"Please !"  Young  Pyecroft  would  come  out  slowly 

and  weeping.  Mr.  Mainwearing  would  grip  him  hungrily. 

"I'll  teach  you  to  humbug  about.  (Cut.)  I'll  teach  you ! 
(Cut.)  I  can't  leave  this  class-room  for  a  moment  but  half 
a  dozen  of  you  must  go  turning  it  upside  down."  (Cut.) 

"Wow!" 

"Don't  answer  me,  Sir!"  (Cut.)  "Don't  answer  me." 
(Cut.)  "Now,  Sir?" 

Pyecroft   completely   subdued.     Pyecroft   relinquished. 

"Now,  are  there  any  more  of  you?"  asked  Mr.  Mainwear- 
ing, feeling  a  little  better. 


176  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Then  he  would  hesitate.  Should  he  take  the  set  work  at 
once,  or  should  he  steal  upstairs  on  tiptoe  to  catch  out  one 
of  the  assistants?  His  practice  varied.  He  always  sus- 
pected Noakley  of  his  afternoon  sleep,  and  was  never  able 
to  catch  him.  Noakley  slept  with  the  class-room  door 
slightly  open.  His  boys  could  hear  the  opening  of  the  class- 
room door  downstairs.  When  they  did  they  would  smack 
down  a  book  upon  the  desk  close  beside  him,  and  Noakley 
would  start  teaching  instantly  like  an  automaton  that  has 
just  been  released.  He  didn't  take  a  second  to  awaken, 
so  that  he  was  very  hard  indeed  to  catch. 

The  school  remained  a  scene  of  jaded  activities  until  four, 
when  a  bell  rang  for  afternoon  prayers  under  Mr.  Main- 
wearing  in  the  main  schoolroom.  Then  the  boys  would  sing 
a  hymn  while  Kahn  accompanied  on  a  small  harmonium  that 
stood  in  the  corner  of  the  room.  While  prayers  were  go- 
ing on  a  certain  scattered  minority  of  the  boys  were  specu- 
lating whether  Kahn  or  Smithers  would  remember  this  or 
that  task  that  had  been  imposed  in  a  moment  of  passion, 
weighing  whether  it  was  safer  to  obey  or  forget.  Kahn  and 
Smithers  would  return  to  the  class-rooms  reluctantly  to 
gather  in  the  harvest  of  their  own  wrath,  but  now  for  a  little 
time  Noakley  was  free  to  do  nothing.  Noakley  hardly  ever 
imposed  punishments.  When  he  was  spoken  to  upon  the 
subject  he  would  put  his  nose  down  in  a  thoughtful  manner 
and  reply  in  a  tone  of  mild  observation:  "The  boys,  they 
seem  to  mind  me  somehow." 

Meanwhile  the  released  boys  dispersed  to  loaf  about  the 
playground  and  the  outhouses  and  playing-field  until  tea  at 
five.  Sometimes  there  was  a  hectic  attempt  at  cricket  or 
football  in  the  field  in  which  Mr.  Mainwearing  participated, 
and  then  tea  was  at  half-past  five.  When  Mr.  Mainwearing 
participated  he  liked  to  bat,  and  he  did  not  like  to  be  bowled 
out.  Noakley  was  vaguely  supposed  to  superintend  tea 
and  evening  prep.,  and  the  boys,  after  a  supper  of  milk  and 
biscuits,  were  packed  off  to  bed  at  half-past  eight.  It  was 
much  too  early  to  send  the  bigger  boys  to  bed,  but  "Good 
God!"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing;  "am  I  to  have  no  peace  in  my 
day?"  And  he  tried  to  ease  his  conscience  about  what 
might  go  on  in  the  dormitories  after  bedtime  by  directing 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      177 

Noakley  to  "exercise  a  general  supervision,"  and  by  oc- 
casionally stealing  upstairs  in  his  socks. 

Wednesday  and  Saturday  were  half-holidays,  and  in  the 
afternoon  the  boys  wore  flannels  or  shorts,  according  to  the 
season,  and  played  pick-up  cricket  or  football  or  hockey  in  a 
well-worn  field  at  the  back  of  the  school,  or  they  went  for  a 
walk  with  Noakley  or  Sraithers.  On  Sundays  they  wrore  top 
hats  and  pseudo-Eton  jackets,  and  went  to  church  in  the 
morning  and  the  evening.  In  the  afternoon  Smithers  took 
Scripture  wearily  for  an  hour,  and  then  went  for  a  walk 
with  Noakley.  And  on  Sunday  evening  they  wrote  home 
carefully  supervised  letters  saying  how  happy  they  were  and 
how  they  were  all  in  the  best  of  health  and  about  ''examina- 
tional prospects,"  and  how  they  hoped  they  were  making 
satisfactory  progress  and  suchlike  topics.  But  they  never 
gave  any  account  of  the  talk  that  went  on  during  the  play- 
ground loafing,  nor  of  the  strange  games  and  ceremonies  over 
which  Probyn  presided  in  the  dormitories,  nor  of  the  exer- 
cises of  Mr.  Mainwearing's  cane.  There  was  no  library, 
and  the  boys  never  read  anything  except  school  books  and 
such  printed  matter  as  they  themselves  introduced  into  the 
school.  They  never  read  nor  drew  nor  painted  nor  made 
verses  to  please  themselves.  They  never  dreamt  of  acting 
or  singing.  Their  only  training  in  the  use  of  their  hands 
was  at  cricket,  and  they  never  looked  at  a  newspaper.  Oc- 
casionally Smithers  gave  a  lesson  in  botany,  but  there  was 
no  other  science  teaching.  Science  teaching  requires  ap- 
paratus and  apparatus  costs  money,  and  so  far  as  the  pros- 
pectus went  it  was  quite  easy  to  call  the  botany  "sci- 
ence." .  .  . 

§  10 

In  this  manner  did  High  Cross  School  grind  and  polish  its 
little  batch  of  boys  for  their  participation  in  the  affairs  of 
the  greatest,  most  civilized  and  most  civilizing  empire  the 
world  has  ever  seen. 

It  was,  perhaps,  a  bad  specimen  of  an  English  private 
school,  but  it  was  a  specimen.  There  were  worse  as  well 
as  better  among  the  schools  of  England.  There  were  no 


178  JOAN  AND  PETER 

doubt  many  newer  and  larger,  many  cleaner,  many  better 
classified.  Some  had  visiting  drill-sergeants,  some  had  chem- 
istry cupboards,  some  had  specially  built  gymnasia,  some 
even  had  school  libraries  of  a  hundred  volumes  or  so.  ... 
Most  of  them  had  better  housing  and  better  arranged  dormi- 
tories. And  most  of  them  were  consistently  "preparatory," 
stuck  to  an  upward  age-limit,  and  turned  out  a  boy  as  soon 
as  he  became  a  youth  to  go  on  to  business  or  medicine  or  the 
public  schools.  Mr.  Mainwearing's  school  was  exceptional  in 
this,  that  it  had  to  hold  on  to  all  it  could  get.  He  had  a 
connexion  with  one  or  two  solicitors,  an  understanding — 
Mr.  Grimes  was  one  of  his  friends — and  his  school  contained 
in  addition  to  Peter  several  other  samples  of  that  unfortunate 
type  of  boy  whose  school  is  found  for  him  by  a  solicitor. 
Some  stayed  at  Windsor  with  Mr.  Mainwearing  during  the 
holidays.  In  that  matter  High  Cross  School  was  exceptional. 
But  the  want  of  any  intellectual  interest,  of  any  spon- 
taneous activities  of  the  mind  at  all  in  High  Cross  School, 
was  no  exceptional  thing. 

Life  never  stands  altogether  still,  but  it  has  a  queer 
tendency  to  form  stationary  eddies,  and  very  much  of  the 
education  of  middle-class  and  upper-class  youth  in  England 
had  been  an  eddy  for  a  century.  The  still  exquisite  and 
impressionable  brains  of  the  new  generation  came  tumbling 
down  the  stream,  curious,  active,  greedy,  and  the  eddying 
schools  caught  them  with  a  grip  of  iron  and  spun  them 
round  and  round  for  six  or  seven  precious  years  and  at  last 
flung  them  out.  .  .  . 

§  11 

Into  this  vicious  eddy  about  Mr.  Mainwearing's  life  and 
school  came  the  developing  brain  of  Master  Peter  Stubland, 
and  resented  it  extremely.  At  first  he  had  been  too  much 
astonished  by  his  transfer  from  Limpsfield  to  entertain  any 
other  emotion;  it  was  only  after  some  days  at  High  Cross 
School  that  he  began  to  realize  that  the  experience  was  not 
simply  astonishing  but  uncongenial,  and  indeed  hateful. 

He  discovered  he  hated  the  whole  place.  Comprehended 
within  this  general  hatred  were  particular  ones.  He  hated 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       179 

Newton.  The  fight  remained  in  suspense,  neither  boy  knew 
anything  of  scientific  fisticuffs,  neither  had  ever  worn  a 
boxing-glove,  and  both  were  disposed  to  evade  the  hard,  clear 
issue  of  the  ring.  But  Newton  continued  to  threaten  and 
grimace  at  him,  and  once  as  he  was  passing  Peter  on  the 
staircase  he  turned  about  and  punched  him  in  the  back. 

For  Newton  Peter's  hatred  was  uncomplicated;  for  Pro- 
byn  and  a  second  boy  nearly  as  big,  a  fair,  sleepy  boy  named 
Ames,  Peter  had  a  feeling  that  differed  from  a  clear,  clean 
hatred;  it  had  an  element  of  disgust  and  dread  in  it.  Pro- 
byn,  with  Ames  as  an  accessory  and  Newton  as  his  pet 
toady,  dominated  the  school.  It  is  an  unnatural  and  an  un- 
wholesome thing  for  boys  and  youths  of  various  ages  to  be 
herded  as  closely  together  as  they  were  in  High  Cross 
School;  the  natural  instinct  of  the  young  is  against  such  an 
association.  In  a  good,  big  school  whose  atmosphere  is 
wholesome,  boys  will  classify  themselves  out  in  the  complet- 
est  way;  they  will  not  associate,  they  will  scarcely  speak 
with  boys  outside  their  own  year.  There  is  a  foolish  way  of 
disposing  of  this  fact  by  saying  that  boys  are  "such  Snobs." 
But  indeed  they  are  kept  apart  by  the  fiercest  instinct  of 
self-preservation.  All  life  and  all  its  questions  are  stirring 
and  unfolding  in  the  young  boy ;  in  every  sort  of  young  crea- 
ture a  natural  discretion  fights  against  forced  and  prema- 
ture developments.  "Keep  to  your  phase,"  says  nature. 
The  older  boys,  perplexed  by  novel  urgencies  and  curiosities, 
are  embarrassed  by  their  younger  fellows ;  younger  boys  are 
naturally  afraid  of  older  ones  and  a  little  disposed  to  cringe. 
But  what  were  such  considerations  as  these  to  a  man  like 
Mainwearing?  He  had  never  thought  over,  he  had  long  since 
forgotten,  his  own  development.  Any  boy,  old  or  young, 
whose  parents  could  pay  the  bill,  was  got  into  the  school  and 
kept  in  the  school  as  long  as  possible.  None  of  the  school 
work  was  interesting;  there  were  constant  gaps  in  the  rou- 
tine when  there  was  nothing  to  do  but  loaf.  It  was  inevit- 
able that  the  older  boys  should  become  mischievous  louts; 
they  bullied  and  tormented  and  corrupted  the  younger 
boys  because  there  was  nothing  else  to  do ;  if  there  had  been 
anything  else  to  do  they  would  have  absolutely  disregarded 
the  younger  boys ;  and  the  younger  boys  did  what  they  could 


180  JOAN  AND  PETER 

to  propitiate  these  powerful  and  unaccountable  giants.  The 
younger  boys  ''sucked  up"  to  the  bigger  boys;  they  became, 
as  it  were,  clients;  they  were  annexed  by  patrons.  They 
professed  unlimited  obedience  in  exchange  for  protection. 
Newton,  for  instance,  called  himself  Probyn's  "monkey"; 
Pyecroft  was  Ames's.  Probyn  would  help  Newton  with  his 
sums,  amuse  himself  by  putting  him  to  the  torture  (when 
Newton  was  expected  to  display  a  doglike  submission)  or 
make  him  jealous  by  professing  an  affection  for  other  small 
boys. 

Peter  came  into  this  stuffy  atmosphere  of  forced  and 
undignified  relationships  instinct,  though  he  knew  it  not, 
with  a  passionate  sense  of  honour.  From  the  very  begin- 
ning he  knew  there  was  something  in  these  boys  and  in  their 
atmosphere  that  made  them  different  from  himself,  some- 
thing from  which  he  had  to  keep  himself  aloof.  There  was 
a  word  missing  from  his  vocabulary  that  would  have  ex- 
pressed it,  and  that  word  was  "Cad."  But  at  the  School 
of  St.  George  and  the  Venerable  Bede  they  were  not  taught 
to  call  any  people  "cads." 

He  was  a  boy  capable  of  considerable  reserve.  He  did  not, 
like  young  Winterbaum,  press  his  every  thought  and  idea 
upon  those  about  him.  He  could  be  frank  where  he  was 
confident,  but  this  sense  of  difference  smote  him  dumb.  Sev- 
eral of  his  schoolfellows,  old  Noakley,  and  Mr.  Mainwearing, 
became  uncomfortably  aware  of  an  effect  of  unspoken  com- 
ment in  Peter.  He  would  receive  a  sudden  phrase  of  abuse 
with  a  thoughtful  expression,  as  though  he  weighed  it  and 
compared  it  with  some  exterior  standard.  This  irritated  a 
school  staff  accustomed  to  use  abusive  language.  Probyn, 
after  Peter  had  hit  Newton,  took  a  fancy  to  him  that  did  not 
in  the  least  modify  Peter 's  instinctive  detestation  of  the  red 
nostrils  and  the  sloppy  mouth  and  the  voluminous  bellow. 
Peter  became  rapidly  skilful  in  avoiding  Probyn's  conversa- 
tion, and  this  monstrously  enhanced  his  attraction  for  Pro- 
byn. Probyn's  attention  varied  between  deliberate  attempts 
to  vex  and  deliberate  attempts  to  propitiate.  He  kept  alive 
the  promise  of  a  fight  with  Newton,  and  frankly  declared 
that  Peter  could  lick  Newton  any  day.  Newton  was  as  dis- 
tressed as  a  cast  mistress. 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      181 

One  evening  the  cadaverous  boy  discovered  Peter  drawing 
warriors  on  horseback.  He  reported  this  strange  gift  to 
Ames.  Ames  came  demanding  performances,  and  Peter 
obliged. 

"He  can  draw,"  said  Ames.  "George  and  the  Dragon, 
eh?  It's  good." 

Probyn  was  shouted  to,  and  joined  in  the  admiration. 

Peter  drew  this  and  that  by  request. 

"Draw  a  woman,"  said  Ames,  and  then,  as  the  nimble 
pencil  obeyed,  "No — not  an  old  woman.  Draw — you  know. 
Draw  a  savage  woman." 

"Draw  a  girl  bathing — like  they  are  in  Ally  Sloper's  Half- 
Holiday,"  said  Probyn.  "Just  with  light  things  on." 

"Draw  a  heathen  goddess,"  said  Ames.  "With  nothing 
on  at  all." 

Peter  said  he  couldn't  draw  goddesses. 

"Go  on,"  said  Ames.     "Draw  a  savage  woman." 

Peter,  being  pressed,  tried  a  negress.  They  hung  over 
him  insisting  upon  details. 

"Get  out,  young  Newton!"  cried  Probyn.  "Don't  come 
hanging  round  here.  He's  drawing  things." 

Ames  pressed  further  requests. 

"Shan't  draw  any  more,"  said  Peter  with  a  sudden  dis- 
inclination. 

"Go  it,  Simon  Peter,"  said  Ames,  "don't  be  a  mammy- 
good." 

"Gaw!  if  I  could  draw!"  said  Probyn. 

But  Peter  had  finished  drawing. 

§  12 

No  further  questions  were  asked  Peter  about  his  father, 
but  on  Sunday  night,  when  home-letter  time  came  round, 
any  doubt  about  the  soundness  of  his  social  position  was 
set  at  rest  by  Mr.  Mainwearing  himself.  Home-letters  from 
High  Cross  School  involved  so  many  delicate  considerations 
that  the  proprietor  made  it  his  custom  to  supervise  them 
himself.  He  distributed  sheets  of  paper  with  the  school 
heading,  and  afterwards  he  collected  them  and  addressed 
them  himself  in  his  study.  "You,  Stubland,  must  write  a 


182  JOAN  AND  PETER 

letter  to  your  aunt,"  he  said  loudly  across  the  room,  "and 
tell  her  how  you  are  getting  on." 

"Aunt  Phyllis?"  said  Peter. 

' '  No,  no ! "  Mr.  Mainwearing  answered  in  clear  tones. 
"Your  aunt,  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham. " 

Respectful  glances  at  Peter,  and  a  stare  of  admiration 
from  Probyn. 

After  a  season  of  reflection  Peter  held  up  his  hand. 
"Please,  Sir,  I  don't  write  letters  to  Lady  Charlotte." 

"You  must  begin." 

Still  further  reflection.  "I  want  to  write  to  my  Aunt 
Phyllis." 

"Nonsense!     Do  as  I  tell  you." 

Peter  reflected  again  for  some  minutes.  He  was  deeply 
moved.  He  controlled  a  disposition  to  weep.  (No  one  was 
going  to  see  Peter  blub  in  this  school — ever.)  Then  Mr. 
Mainwearing  saw  him  begin  to  write,  with  intervals  of  deep 
thought.  But  the  letter  was  an  unsatisfactory  one. 

"Dear  Aunt  Phyllis,"  it  began — in  spite  of  instructions. 

"This  is  a  very  nice  school  and  I  like  it  very  much.  I  have 
no  pocket-money.  We  eat  Toke.  Please  come  and  take  me 
away  now.  Your  affectionate  nephew 

"PETER." 

Then  Peter  rubbed  his  eyes  and  it  made  his  finger  wet, 
and  there  was  a  drop  of  eye  wet  fell  on  the  paper,  but  he  did 
not  blub.  He  did  not  blub,  he  knew,  because  he  had  made 
up  his  mind  not  to  blub,  but  his  face  was  flushed  almost 
like  that  of  a  boy  who  has  been  blubbing. 

Mr.  Mainwearing  came  and  read  the  letter.  "Come, 
come,"  he  said,  "this  won't  do,"  which  was  just  what  Peter 
had  expected.  "This  is  obstinacy,"  said  Mr.  Maimvearinjr. 

He  got  Peter  a  fresh  sheet  of  paper  and  stood  over  him. 
"Write  as  I  tell  you,"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing. 

The  other  boys  listened  as  this  letter  was  dictated  to  a 
quiet  but  obedient  Peter: 

"Dear  Lady  Charlotte, 

"I  arrived  safely  on  Wednesday  at  High  Cross  School, 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      183 

which  I  like  very  much.  I  had  a  long  ride  in  an  automo- 
bile. Mr.  Grimes  bought  me  a  splendid  bat.  Mr.  Main- 
wearing  has  examined  me  upon  my  attainments,  and  believes 
that  with  effort  I  shall  make  satisfactory  progress  here.  We 
play  cricket  here  and  do  modern  science  as  well  as  our  classi- 
cal studies.  I  hope  you  may  never  be  disappointed  by  my 
efforts  after  all  your  kindness  to  me. 

"Your  affectionate  nephew, 

"PETER  STUBLAND." 

In  the  night  Peter  woke  up  out  of  an  ugly  and  miserable 
dream,  and  his  eyes  were  wet  with  tears.  He  believed  he 
was  caught  at  High  Cross  School  for  good  and  all.  He  be- 
lieved that  all  the  things  he  hated  and  dreaded  were  about 
him  now  for  ever. 

§  13 

From  the  first  Mr.  Mainwearing  had  been  prepared  for 
Peter's  antagonism.  He  had  been  warned  by  Mr.  Grimes 
that  Peter  might  prove  "a  little  difficult."  The  letter  to 
Aunt  Phyllis  confirmed  this  impression  he  had  already  formed 
of  a  fund  of  stiff  resistance  in  his  new  pupil.  "I  shall  have 
to  talk  to  that  young  man, ' '  he  said. 

The  occasion  was  not  long  in  coming. 

It  came  next  morning  in  the  general  Scripture  lesson.  The 
boys  were  reading  the  Gospel  of  St.  Matthew  verse  by  verse, 
and  in  order  to  check  inattention  Mr.  Mainwearing,  instead 
of  allowing  the  boys  to  read  in  rotation,  was  dodging  the 
next  verse  irregularly  from  boy  to  boy.  "Now,  Pyecroft, " 
he  would  say;  "Now — Rivers." 

He  was  always  ready  to  pick  up  a  nickname  and  improve 
upon  it  for  the  general  amusement.  "Now,  Simonides,"  he 
said. 

No  answer. 

"Simonides!" 

Peter,  with  his  New  Testament  open  before  him,  was  study- 
ing the  map  of  Africa  on  the  end  wall.  That  was  Egypt 
and  that  was  the  Nile,  and  down  that  you  went  to  Uganda, 
where  all  the  people  dressed  in  white  and  Nobby  walked 
fearlessly  among  lions. 


184  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter  became  aware  of  a  loud  shout  of  ' '  Siin-on-i-des ! ' ' 

It  was  apparently  being  addressed  to  him  by  Mr.  Main- 
wearing.  He  returned  at  a  jump  to  Europe  and  High  Cross 
School. 

' '  Wool-gathering  again, ' '  said  Mr.  Mainwearing.  ' '  Think- 
ing of  the  dear  old  Agapemone,  eh?  We  can't  have  that 
here,  young  man.  We  can't  allow  that  here.  We  must 
quicken  that  proud  but  sluggish  spirit  of  yours.  With  the 
usual  stimulus.  Come  out,  sir." 

He  moved  towards  the  cane,  which  hung  from  a  nail  beside 
the  high  desk. 

Obliging  schoolfellows  explained  to  Peter.  "He  spoke 
to  you  three  times. "  * '  He 's  going  to  swish  you. "  "  You  '11 
get  it." 

Peter  went  very  white  and  sat  very  tight. 

"Now,  young  man,"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing,  flicking  the 
cane.  "Step  out,  please.  .  .  . 

' '  Come  out  here,  sir. ' ' 

No  answer  from  Peter. 

"Stubland,"  roared  Mr.  Mainwearing.  "Come  out  at 
once." 

There  came  a  break  in  the  traditions  of  High  Cross  School. 

Peter  rose  to  his  feet.  It  seemed  he  was  going  to  obey. 
And  then  he  said  in  a  voice,  faint  and  small  but  perfectly 
clear,  "I  ain't  going  to  be  caned.  No." 

There  was  a  great  pause.  There  was  as  it  were  silence  in 
Heaven.  And  then,  his  footsteps  echoing  through  that  im- 
mensity of  awe,  Mr.  Mainwearing  advanced  upon  Peter. 
Peter  with  a  loud  undignified  cry  fled  along  the  wall  under 
the  map  of  Palestine  towards  the  door. 

"Stop  him  there,  Ames!"  cried  Mr.  Mainwearing. 
Ames  was  slow  to  understand. 

Mr.  Mainwearing  put  down  the  cane  on  the  mantelshelf  and 
became  very  active ;  he  leapt  a  desk  clumsily,  upset  an  inkpot, 
and  collided  with  Ames  at  the  door  a  moment  after  Peter  had 
vanished.  On  the  landing  outside  Peter  hesitated,  and  then 
doubled  downstairs  to  the  boot-hole.  For  a  moment  Mr. 
Mainwearing  was  at  fault.  "Hell !"  he  said.  All  the  class- 
room heard  him  say  "Hell!"  All  the  school  treasured  that 
cry  in  its  heart  for  future  use.  "Young — ,"  said  Mr.  Main- 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      185 

wearing.  It  was  long  a  matter  for  secret  disputation  in  the 
school  what  particularly  choice  sort  of  young  thing  Mr. 
Mainwearing  had  called  Peter.  Then  he  heard  a  crash  in 
the  boot-hole  and  was  downstairs  in  a  moment.  Peter  was 
out  in  the  area,  up  the  area  steps  as  quick  as  a  scared  grey 
mouse,  and  then  he  made  his  mistake.  He  struck  out  across 
the  open  in  front  of  the  house.  In  a  dozen  strides  Mr.  Main- 
wearing  had  him. 

"I'll  thrash  you,  Sir,"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing,  swinging 
the  little  body  by  the  collar,  and  shaking  him  as  a  dog  might 
shake  a  rat.  "I'll  thrash  you.  I'll  thrash  you  before  the 
whole  school." 

But  two  people  had  their  blood  up  now. 

"I'll  tell  my  uncle  Nobby,"  yelled  Peter.  "I'll  tell  my 
uncle  Nobby.  He's  a  soldier." 

Thus  disputing  they  presently  reappeared  in  the  lower 
class-room.  Peter  was  tremendously  dishevelled  and  still 
kicking,  and  Mr.  Mainwearing  was  holding  him  by  the  gen- 
eral slack  of  his  garments. 

"Silence,  Sir,  while  I  thrash  you,"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing, 
and  he  was  red  and  moist. 

"My  uncle,  he's  a  soldier.  He's  a  V.C.  You  thrash  me 
and  he  '11  kill  you.  He  '11  kill  you.  He  '11  kill  you. ' ' 

"Gimme  my  cane,  some  one,"  said  Mr.  Mainwearing. 

"He'll  kill  you." 

Nobody  got  the  cane.  "Probyn,"  cried  Mr.  Mainwear- 
ing, "give  me  my  cane." 

Probyn  hesitated,  and  then  said  to  young  Newton,  "You 
get  it."  Young  Newton  had  been  standing  up,  half  offer- 
ing himself  for  this  service.  He  handed  the  cane  to  Mr. 
Mainwearing. 

"You  touch  me!"  threatened  Peter,  "you  touch  me. 
He'll  kill  you,"  and  taking  advantage  of  the  moment  when 
Mr.  Mainwearing 's  hand  was  extended  for  the  cane  he  scored 
a  sound  kick  on  the  master's  knee.  Then  by  an  inspired 
wriggle  he  sought  to  involve  himself  with  Mr.  Mainwearing 's 
gown  in  such  a  manner  as  to  protect  his  more  vulnerable  area. 

But  now  Mr.  Mainwearing  was  in  a  position  to  score.  He 
stuck  his  cane  between  his  teeth  in  an  impressive  and  ter- 
rible manner,  and  then  got  his  gown  loose  and  altered  his  grip 


186  JOAN  AND  PETER 

on  his  small  victim.  Now  for  it!  The  school  hung  breath- 
less. Cut.  Peter  became  as  lively  as  an  eel.  Cut. 

There  were  tears  in  his  voice,  but  his  voice  was  full  and 
clear. 

"He'll  kill  you.  He'll  come  here  and  kill  you.  I'll  burn 
down  the  school." 

"You  will,  will  you?" 

Cut.     A  kick.     Cut.     Silent  wriggles. 

"Five.  Six.  Seven.  Eight.  Nine.  Ten,"  counted  Mr. 
Mainwearing  and  stopped,  and  let  go  his  hold  with  a  shove. 
"Now  go  to  your  place,"  he  said.  He  was  secretly  grateful 
to  Peter  that  he  went.  Peter  had  a  way  at  times  of  looking  a 
very  small  boy,  and  he  did  so  now.  He  was  tearful,  red  and 
amazingly  dishevelled,  but  still  not  broken  down  to  technical 
blubbing.  His  face  was  streaked  with  emotion;  it  was  only 
too  manifest  that  the  routines  of  High  Cross  had  reduced  his 
private  ablutions  to  a  minimum.  He  glanced  over  his 
shoulder  to  see  if  he  was  still  pursued.  He  could  still  sob, 
"My  uncle." 

But  Mr.  Mainwearing  did  not  mean  this  to  be  the  close  of 
the  encounter.  He  had  thought  out  the  problems  of  disci- 
pline according  to  his  lights;  a  boy  must  give  in.  Peter  had 
still  to  give  in. 

"And  now  Stubland, "  he  proclaimed,  "stay  in  after  after- 
noon school,  stay  in  all  tomorrow,  and  write  me  out  five  hun- 
dred times,  '1  must  not  sulk.  I  must  obey.'  Five  hundred 
times,  Sfr. " 

Something  muffled  was  audible  from  Peter,  something  sug- 
gestive of  a  refusal. 

"Bring  them  to  me  on  Wednesday  evening  at  latest.  That 
will  keep  you  busy — and  no  time  to  spare.  You  hear  me. 
Sir?  'I  must  not  sulk'  and  'I  must  obey.'  And  if  they  are 
not  ready,  Sir,  twelve  strokes  good  and  full.  And  every 
morning  until  they  are  ready,  twelve  strokes.  That's  how 
we  do  things  here.  No  shirking.  Play  the  fool  with  me  and 
you  pay  for  it — up  to  the  hilt.  This,  at  any  rate,  is  a  school, 
a  school  where  discipline  is  respected,  whatever  queer  So- 
cialist Agapemone  you  may  have  frequented  before.  And 
now  I've  taken  you  in  hand,  young  man,  I  mean  to  go  through 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      187 

with  you — if  you  have  a  hundred  uncles  Nobchick  armed  to 
the  teeth.  If  you  have  a  thousand  uncles  Nobchick,  they 
won't  help  you,  if  you  air  your  stubborn  temper  at  High 
Cross  School.  ..." 

Perhaps  Peter  would  have  written  the  lines,  but  young 
Newton,  in  the  company  of  two  friends,  came  up  to  him  in 
the  playground  before  dinner.  "Going  to  write  those  lines, 
Simon  Peter?"  asked  young  Newton. 

What  could  a  chap  do  but  say,  "No  fear." 

"You'll  write  'em  all  right,"  said  Newton,  and  turned 
scornfully.  So  Peter  sat  in  the  stuffy  schoolroom  during 
detention  time,  and  drew  pictures  of  soldiers  and  battles  and 
adventures  and  mused  and  made  his  plans. 

He  was  going  to  run  away.  He  was  going  to  run  right  out 
of  this  disgusting  place  into  the  world.  He  would  run  away 
tomorrow  after  the  midday  meal.  It  would  be  the  Wednes- 
day half-holiday,  and  to  go  off  then  gave  him  his  very  best 
chance  of  a  start ;  he  might  not  be  missed  by  any  one  in 
particular  throughout  the  afternoon.  The  gap  of  time  until 
tea-time  seemed  to  him  to  be  a  limitless  gap.  "Abscond," 
said  Peter,  a  beautiful,  newly-acquired  word.  Just  exactly 
whither  he  wanted  to  go,  he  did  not  know.  Vaguely  he  sup- 
posed he  would  have  to  go  to  his  Limpsfield  aunts,  but  what 
he  wanted  to  think  he  was  doing  was  running  away  to  sea. 
He  was  going  to  run  away  to  sea  and  meet  Nobby  very  soon ; 
he  was  going  to  run  against  Nobby  by  the  happiest  chance, 
Nobby  alone,  or  perhaps  even  (this  was  still  dreamier) 
Daddy  and  Mummy.  Then  they  would  go  on  explorations 
together,  and  he  and  Nobby  would  sleep  side  by  side  at 
camp  fires  amidst  the  howling  of  lions.  Somewhere  upon 
that  expedition  he  would  come  upon  Mainwearing  and  Pro- 
byn  and  Newton,  captives  perhaps  in  the  hands  of  savages. 

What  would  he  and  Nobby  and  Mummy  and  Daddy  and 
Bungo  Peter  and  Joan  do  to  such  miscreants?  .  .  . 

This  kept  Peter  thinking  a  long  time.  Because  it  was 
beyond  the  limits  of  Peter's  generosity  just  now  to  spare  Mr. 
Mainwearing.  Probyn  perhaps.  Probyn,  penitent  to  the 
pitch  of  tears,  might  be  reduced  to  the  status  of  a  humble 
fag;  even  Newton  might  go  on  living  in  some  very  menial 


188  JOAN  AND  PETER 

capacity — there  could  be  a  dog  with  the  party  of  which  New- 
ton would  always  go  in  fear — but  Mr.  Mainweariug  had  ex- 
ceeded the  limits  of  mercy.  .  .  . 

A  man  like  that  was  capable  of  any  treason.  .  .  . 

Peter  had  it! — a  beautiful  scene.  Mr.  Mainwearing  de- 
tected in  a  hideous  conspiracy  with  a  sinister  Arab  trader  to 
murder  the  entire  expedition,  would  be  captured  redhanded 
by  Peter  (armed  with  a  revolver  and  a  cutlass)  and  brought 
before  Nobby  and  Bungo  Peter.  "The  man  must  die," 
Nobby  would  say.  "And  quickly,"  Bungo  Peter  would 
echo,  "seeing  how  perilous  is  our  present  situation." 

Then  Peter  would  step  forward.  Mr.  Mainwearing  in  a 
state  of  abject  terror  would  fling  himself  down  before  him, 
cling  to  his  knees,  pray  for  forgiveness,  pray  Peter  to  inter- 
cede. 

Yes.     On  the  whole — yes.     Peter  would  intercede. 

Peter  began  to  see  the  scene  as  a  very  beautiful  one  in- 
deed. .  .  . 

But  Nobby  would  be  made  of  sterner  stuff.  "You  are 
too  noble,  Peter.  In  such  a  country  as  this  we  cannot  be  cum- 
bered with  traitor  carrion.  "We  have  killed  the  Arab.  Is  it 
just  to  spare  this  thousand  times  more  perjured  wretch, 
this  blot  upon  the  fair  name  of  Englishman  ?  Mainwearing, 
if  such  indeed  be  your  true  name,  down  on  your  knees  and 
make  your  peace  with  God."  .  .  . 

At  this  moment  the  reverie  was  interrupted  by  Mr.  Main- 
wearing  in  cricketing  flannels  traversing  the  schoolroom.  He 
was  going  to  have  a  whack  before  tea.  He  just  stood  at  the 
wickets  and  made  the  bigger  boys  bowl  to  him. 

Little  he  knew ! 

Peter  affected  to  write  industriously.  .  .  . 

§  14 

After  the  midday  meal  on  Wednesday  Peter  loafed  for  a 
little  time  in  the  playground. 

"Coming  to  play  cricket,  Simon  Peter?"  said  Probyn. 

"Got  to  stay  in  the  schoolroom,"  said  Peter. 

"He's  going  to  write  his  five  hundred  lines,"  said  young 
Newton.  "I  said  he  would." 


THE  HIGH  CEOSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL       189 

(Young  Newton  would  know  better  later.) 

Peter  went  back  unobtrusively  to  the  schoolroom.  In  his 
desk  were  two  slices  of  bread-and-butter  secreted  from  the 
breakfast  table  and  wrapped  in  clean  pages  from  an  exercise- 
book.  These  were  his  simple  provisions.  With  these,  a  pen- 
cil, and  a  good  serviceable  catapult  he  proposed  to  set  out  into 
the  wide,  wide  world.  He  had  no  money. 

He  "scouted"  Mr.  Mainwearing  into  his  study,  marked 
that  he  shut  the  door,  and  heard  him  pull  down  the  blind. 
The  armchair  creaked  as  the  schoolmaster  sat  down  for  the 
afternoon's  repose.  That  would  make  a  retreat  from  the 
front  door  of  the  school  house  possible.  The  back  of  the 
house  meant  a  risk  of  being  seen  by  the  servants,  the  play- 
ground door  or  the  cricket-field  might  attract  the  attention  of 
some  sneak.  But  from  the  front  door  to  the  road  and  the 
shelter  of  the  playground  wall  was  but  ten  seconds  dash. 
Still  Peter,  from  the  moment  he  crept  out  of  the  main 
class-room  into  the  passage  to  the  moment  when  he  was  out 
of  sight  of  the  windows  was  as  tightly  strung  as  a  fiddle- 
string.  Never  before  in  all  his  little  life  had  he  lived  at  such 
a  pitch  of  nervous  intensity.  Once  in  the  road  he  ran,  and 
continued  to  run  until  he  turned  into  the  road  to  Clewer. 
Then  he  dropped  into  a  good  smart  walk.  The  world  was 
all  before  him. 

The  world  was  a  warm  October  afternoon  and  a  straight 
road,  poplars  and  red  roofs  ahead.  Whither  the  road  ran 
he  had  no  idea,  but  in  the  back  of  his  mind,  obscured  but  by 
no  means  hidden  by  a  cloud  of  dreams,  was  the  necessity 
of  getting  to  Ingle-Nook.  After  he  had  walked  perhaps 
half  a  mile  upon  the  road  to  Clewer  it  occurred  to  Peter  that 
he  would  ask  his  way. 

The  first  person  he  asked  was  a  nice  little  old  lady  with 
a  kind  face,  and  she  did  not  know  where  the  road  went  nor 
whence  it  came.  "That  way  it  goes  to  Pescod  Street,"  she 
said,  "if  you  take  the  right  turning,  and  that  way  it  goes 
past  the  racecourse.  But  you  have  to  turn  off,  you  know. 
That's  Clewer  Church." 

No,  she  didn't  know  which  was  the  way  to  Limpsfield. 
Perhaps  if  Peter  asked  the  postman  he'd  know. 

No  postman  was  visible.  .  .  . 


190  JOAN  AND  PETER 

The  next  person  Peter  asked  was  as  excessive  as  the  old 
lady  was  deficient.  He  was  a  large,  smiling,  self-satisfied 
man,  with  a  hearty  laugh. 

' '  Where  does  the  road  go,  my  boy  ? "  he  repeated.  ' '  Why ! 
it  goes  to  Maidenhead  and  Cookham.  Cookham !  Have  you 
hear  the  story?  This  is  the  way  the  man  told  the  waiter  to 
take  the  underdone  potatoes.  Because  it's  the  way  to  Cook- 
ham.  See?  Good,  eh?  But  not  so  good  as  telling  him  to 
take  peas  that  was.  Through  Windsor,  you  know.  Because 
it's  the  way  to  Turnham  Green.  Ha,  ha! 

"How  far  is  Maidenhead?  Oh!  a  tidy  bit — a  tidy  bit. 
Say  four  miles.  Put  it  at  four  miles." 

When  Peter  asked  for  Limpsfield  the  large  man  at  once 
jumped  to  the  conclusion  he  meant  Winchfield.  "That's  a 
bit  on  your  left, ' '  he  said, ' 'just  a  bit  on  your  left.  How  far  ? 
Oh!  a  tidy  bit.  Say  five  miles — five  miles  and  a  'arf,  say." 

When  he  had  gone  on  a  little  way  the  genial  man  shouted 
"back  to  Peter:  "Might  be  six  miles,  perhaps,"  he  said. 
"Not  more." 

Which  was  comforting  news.  So  Peter  went  on  his  way 
with  his  back  to  Limpsfield — which  was  a  good  thirty  miles 
and  more  away  from  him — and  a  pleasant  illusion  that  Aunts 
Phyllis  and  Phcebe  were  quite  conveniently  just  round  the 
corner.  .  .  . 

About  four  o'clock  he  had  discovered  Maidenhead  bridge, 
and  thereafter  the  river  held  him  to  the  end.  He  had 
never  had  a  good  look  at  a  river  before.  It  was  a  glowing 
October  afternoon,  and  the  river  life  was  enjoying  its  Indian 
summer.  High  Cross  School  was  an  infinite  distance  away, 
and  all  its  shadows  were  dismissed  from  his  mind.  Boats 
are  wonderful  things  to  a  small  boy  who  has  lived  among 
hills.  He  wandered  slowly  along  the  towing-path,  and 
watched  several  boats  and  barges  through  the  lock.  In  each 
boat  he  hoped  to  see  Uncle  Nobby.  But  it  just  happened 
that  Uncle  Nobby  wasn't  there.  Near  the  lock  some  peo- 
ple were  feeding  two  swans.  When  they  had  gone  through 
the  lock  Peter  went  close  down  to  the  swans.  They 
came  to  him  in  a  manner  so  friendly  that  he  gave  them  the 
better  part  of  his  provisions.  After  that  he  watched  the 
operations  of  a  man  repairing  a  Canadian  canoe  beside  a 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      191 

boat-letting  place.  Then  he  became  interested  in  the  shoaling 
fish  in  the  shallows.  After  that  he  walked  for  a  time,  on 
past  some  little  islands.  At  last,  as  he  was  now  a  little 
foot-sore,  he  sat  down  on  the  bank  in  the  lush  grass  above 
some  clumps  of  sweet  rush. 

He  was  just  opposite  the  autumnal  fires  of  the  Cleveden 
woods,  amidst  which  he  could  catch  glimpses  of  Italian 
balustrading.  The  water  was  a  dark  mirror  over  which 
hung  a  bloom  of  mist.  Now  and  then  an  infrequent  boat 
would  glide  noiselessly  or  with  a  measured  beat  of  row- 
locks, through  the  brown  w*ater.  Afar  off  was  a  swan.  .  .  . 

Presently  he  would  go  on  to  Ingle-Xook.  But  not  just  yet. 
When  his  feet  and  legs  were  a  little  rested  he  would  go  on. 
He  would  ask  first  for  Limpsfield  and  then  for  Ingle-Nook. 
It  would  be  three  or  four  miles.  He  would  get  there  in  time 
for  supper. 

He  was  struck  by  a  thought  that  should  have  enlightened 
him.  He  wondered  no  one  had  ever  brought  him  before 
from  Ingle-Xook  to  this  beautiful  place.  It  was  funny  they 
did  not  know  of  it.  .  .  . 

Above  that  balustrading  among  the  trees  over  there,  must 
be  a  palace,  and  in  that  palace  lived  a  beautiful  princess  who 
loved  Peter.  .  .  . 

§  15 

It  seemed  at  the  first  blush  the  most  delightful  accident 
in  the  world  that  the  man  with  the  ample  face  should  ask 
Peter  to  mind  his  boat. 

He  rowed  up  to  the  wooden  steps  close  by  where  Peter  was 
sitting.  He  seemed  to  argue  a  little  with  the  lady  who  was 
steering  and  had  to  back  away  again,  but  at  last  he  got 
the  steps  and  shipped  his  oars  and  held  on  with  a  boat  hook 
and  got  out.  He  helped  the  lad}*  to  land. 

"Here,  Tommy!"  he  shouted,  tying  up  the  boat  to  the 
rail  of  the  steps.  "Just  look  after  this  boat  a  bit.  We're 
going  to  have  some  tea." 

"We  shall  have  to  walk  miles,"  said  the  lady. 

"Damn!"  said  the  man. 

Something  seemed  to  tell  Peter  that  the  man  was  cross. 


192  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter  doubted  whether  he  was  properly  Tommy.  Then  he 
saw  that  there  was  something  attractive  in  looking  after  a 
boat. 

"Don't  let  any  one  steal  it,"  said  the  man  with  the 
ample  face,  with  an  unreal  geniality.  "And  I'll  give  you  a 
tanner. ' ' 

Peter  arose  and  came  to  the  steps.  The  lady  and  the 
gentleman  stood  for  a  time  on  the  top  of  the  bank,  disputing 
fiercely — she  wanted  to  go  one  way  and  he  another — and 
finally  disappeared,  still  disputing,  in  the  lady's  direction. 
Or  rather,  the  lady  made  off  in  the  direction  of  Cookham  and 
the  gentleman  followed  protesting.  "Any  way  it's  miles," 
she  said.  .  .  . 

Slowly  the  afternoon  quiet  healed  again.  Peter  was  left 
in  solitude  with  the  boat,  the  silvery  river,  the  overhanging 
woods,  the  distant  swan. 

At  first  he  just  sat  and  looked  at  the  boat. 

It  had  crimson  cushions  in  it,  and  the  lady  had  left  a 
Japanese  sunshade.  The  name  of  the  boat  was  the  Princess 
May.  The  lining  wood  of  the  boat  was  pale  and  the  outer 
wood  and  the  wood  of  the  rowlocks  darker  with  just  one 
exquisite  gold  line.  The  oars  were  very  wonderful,  but  the 
boat-hook  with  its  paddle  was  much  more  wonderful.  It 
would  be  lovely  to  touch  that  boat-hook.  It  was  a  thing  you 
could  paddle  with  or  you  could  catch  hold  with  the  hook 
or  poke  with  the  spike. 

In  a  minute  or  so  the  call  of  the  boat-hook  had  become 
irresistible,  and  Peter  had  got  it  out  of  the  boat.  He  held 
it  up  like  a  spear,  he  waved  it  about.  He  poked  the 
boat  out  with  it  and  tried  to  paddle  with  it  in  the  water 
between  the  boat  and  the  bank,  but  the  boat  swung  back  too 
soon. 

Presently  he  got  into  the  boat  very  carefully  so  as  to 
paddle  with  the  boat-hook  in  the  water  beyond  the  boat.  In 
wielding  the  paddle  he  almost  knocked  off  his  hat,  so  he  took 
it  off  and  laid  it  in  the  bottom  of  the  boat.  Then  he  became 
deeply  interested  in  his  paddling. 

When  he  paddled  in  a  certain  way  the  whole  boat,  he  found, 
began  to  swing  out  and  round,  and  when  he  stopped  paddling 
it  went  back  against  the  bank.  But  it  could  not  go  com- 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      193 

pletely  round  because  of  the  tight  way  in  which  the  ample- 
faced  man  had  tied  it  to  the  rail  of  the  steps.  If  the  rope 
were  tied  quite  at  its  end  the  boat  could  be  paddled  com- 
pletely round.  It  would  be  beautiful  to  paddle  it  completely 
round  with  the  waggling  rudder  up-stream  instead  of  down. 

That  thought  did  not  lead  to  immediate  action.  But 
within  two  minutes  Peter  was  untying  the  boat  and  retying 
it  in  accordance  with  his  ambitions. 

In  those  days  the  Boy  Scout  movement  was  already  in 
existence,  but  it  had  still  to  disseminate  sound  views  about 
knot-tying  among  the  rising  generation.  Peter's  knot  was 
not  so  much  a  knot  as  a  knot-like  gesture.  How  bad  it  was 
he  only  discovered  when  he  was  back  in  the  boat  and  had 
paddled  it  nearly  half-way  round.  Then  he  saw  that  the 
end  of  the  rope  was  slipping  off  the  rail  to  which  he  had 
tied  it  as  a  weary  snake  might  slink  off  into  the  grass.  The 
stem  of  the  boat  was  perhaps  a  yard  from  shore. 

Peter  acted  with  promptitude.  He  dropped  his  paddle, 
ran  to  the  bows,  and  jumped.  Except  for  his  left  leg  he 
landed  safely.  His  left  leg  he  recovered  from  the  water. 
But  there  was  no  catching  the  rope.  It  trailed  submerged 
after  the  boat,  and  the  boat  with  an  exasperating  leisureli- 
ness,  with  a  movement  that  was  barely  perceptible,  widened 
its  distance  from  the  bank. 

For  a  time  Peter's  mind  wrestled  with  this  problem. 
Should  he  try  and  find  a  stick  that  would  reach  the  boat? 
Should  he  throw  stones  so  as  to  bring  it  back  in  shore? 

Or  perhaps  if  he  told  some  one  that  the  boat  was  adrift  ? 

He  went  up  the  steps  to  the  towing-path.  There  was  no 
one  who  looked  at  all  helpful  within  sight.  He  watched  the 
boat  drift  slowly  for  a  time  towards  the  middle  of  the  stream. 
Then  it  seemed  to  be  struck  with  an  idea  of  going  down  to 
Maidenhead.  He  watched  it  recede  and  followed  it  slowly. 
When  he  saw  some  people  afar  off  he  tried  to  look  as  though 
he  did  not  belong  to  the  boat.  He  decided  that  presently 
somebody  would  appear  rowing — whom  he  would  ask  to  catch 
his  boat  for  him.  Then  he  would  tow  it  back  to  its  old 
position. 

Presently  Peter  came  to  the  white  gate  of  a  bungalow  and 
considered  the  advisability  of  telling  a  busy  gardener  who 


194  JOAN  AND  PETER 

was  mowing  a  lawn,  about  the  boat.  But  it  was  difficult  to 
frame  a  suitable  form  of  address. 

Still  further  on  a  pleasant  middle-aged  woman  who  was 
trimming  a  privet  hedge  very  carefully  with  garden  shears, 
seemed  a  less  terrible  person  to  accost.  Peter  said  to  her 
modestly  and  self-f orgetf ully ;  "I  think  there's  a  boat  adrift 
down  there." 

The  middle-aged  woman  peered  through  her  spectacles. 

''Some  one  couldn't  have  tied  it  up,"  she  said,  and  having 
looked  at  the  boat  with  a  quiet  intelligence  for  some  time 
she  resumed  her  clipping. 

Her  behaviour  did  much  to  dispel  Peter's  idea  of  calling 
in  adult  help. 

When  he  looked  again  the  boat  had  turned  round.  It  had 
drifted  out  into  the  middle  of  the  stream,  and  it  seemed 
now  to  be  travelling  rather  faster  and  to  be  rocking  slightly. 
It  was  not  going  down  towards  the  lock  but  away  towards 
where  a  board  said  "Danger."  Danger.  It  was  as  if  a  cold 
hand  was  laid  on  Peter's  heart.  He  no  longer  wanted  to  find 
the  man  with  the  ample  face  and  tell  him  that  his  boat  was 
adrift.  The  sun  had  set,  the  light  seemed  to  have  gone  out  of 
things,  and  Peter  had  a  feeling  that  it  was  long  past  tea- 
time.  He  wished  now  he  had  never  seen  the  man  with  the 
ample  face.  Would  he  have  to  pay  for  the  boat?  Could  he 
say  he  had  never  promised  to  mind  it? 

But  if  that  was  so  why  had  he  got  into  the  boat  and  played 
about  with  it? 

His  left  shoe  and  his  left  trouser-leg  were  very  wet  and 
getting  cold. 

A  great  craving  for  tea  and  home  comforts  generally  arose 
in  Peter's  wayward  mind.  Home  comforts  and  forgetful  ness. 
It  seemed  to  him  high  time  that  he  asked  some  one  the  way  to 
Limpsfield.  .  .  . 

§  16 

When  Noakley  and  Probyn  arrived  at  Maidenhead  bridge 
in  the  late  afternoon  it  seemed  to  them  that  they  had  done  all 
that  reasonable  searchers  could  do,  and  that  the  best  thing 
now  was  to  take  the  train  back  to  Windsor.  They  were 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      195 

tired  and  they  felt  futile.  And  then,  when  hope  was  ex- 
hausted, they  struck  the  trail  of  Peter.  The  policeman  at 
the  foot  of  the  bridge  had  actually  noted  him.  "  'Ovvered 
about  the  bridge  for  a  bit,"  said  the  policeman,  "and  then 
went  along  the  towing  path.  A  little  grave  chap  in  grey 
flannel.  Funny  thing,  but  I  thought  'E  might  be  a  run- 
away. .  .  .  Something  about  'im.  ..." 

So  it  was  that  Noakley  and  Probyn  came  upon  the  ample- 
faced  man  at  the  lock,  in  the  full  tide  of  his  distress. 

He  was  vociferous  to  get  across  to  the  weir.  "The  boat 
ought  to  have  come  down  long  ago,"  he  was  saying,  "unless 
it 's  caught  up  in  something.  If  he  was  in  the  boat  the  kid 's 
drowned  for  certain.  ..." 

Noakley  had  some  difficulty  in  getting  him  to  explain  what 
kid.  It  was  difficult  to  secure  the  attention  of  the  ample- 
faced  man.  In  fact  before  this  could  be  done  he  twice 
pushed  back  Noakley 's  face  with  his  hand  as  though  it  was 
some  sort  of  inanimate  obstacle. 

It  was  a  great  and  tragic  experience  for  Probyn.  They 
both  went  across  by  the  lock  to  the  island  behind  the  lead 
of  the  lockkeeper  and  the  ample-faced  man.  They  came 
out  in  sight  of  the  weir;  the  river  was  still  full  from  the 
late  September  rains  and  the  weir  was  a  frothing  cascade, 
and  at  the  crest  of  it  they  saw  an  upturned  boat  jammed  by 
the  current  against  the  timbers.  A  Japanese  umbrella  cir- 
cled open  in  a  foamy  eddy  below,  stick  upward.  The  sun 
was  down  now;  a  chill  was  in  the  air;  a  sense  of  coming 
winter. 

And  then  close  at  hand,  caught  in  some  weedy  willow 
stems  that  dipped  in  the  rushing  water  Probyn  discovered 
a  little  soddened  straw  hat,  a  little  half-submerged  hat,  bob- 
bing with  the  swift  current,  entangled  in  the  willow  stems. 

It  was  unmistakable.  It  bore  the  white  and  black  ribbon 
of  High  Cross  School. 

"Oh,  my  God!"  cried  Probyn  at  the  sight  of  the  hat,  and 
burst  into  tears. 

"Poor  little  Peter.     I'd  have  done  anything  for  him!" 

He  sobbed,  and  as  he  sobbed  he  talked.  He  became  so 
remorseful  and  so  grossly  sentimental  that  even  Noakley  was 
surprised.  .  .  . 


196  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  17 

When  next  morning  Mr.  Grimes  learnt  by  a  long  and 
expensive  telegram  from  Mr.  Mainwearing,  followed  almost 
immediately  by  a  long  explanatory  letter,  that  Peter  had  run 
away  from  school  and  had  been  drowned  near  Boulter's  Lock, 
he  was  overcome  with  terror.  He  had  visions  of  Aunt 
Phoebe — doubled,  for  he  imagined  Aunt  Phyllis  to  be  just 
such  another — as  an  avenger  of  blood.  At  the  bare  thought 
he  became  again  a  storm  of  vibrations.  His  clerks  in  the 
office  outside  could  hear  his  nails  running  along  his  teeth  all 
the  morning,  like  the  wind  among  the  reeds.  His  imagina- 
tion threw  up  wild  and  hasty  schemes  for  a  long  holiday  in 
some  inaccessible  place,  in  Norway  or  Switzerland,  but  the 
further  he  fled  from  civilization  the  more  unbridled  the 
vengeance,  when  it  did  overtake  him,  might  be.  Lady  Char- 
lotte was  still  in  England.  On  the  day  appointed  and  for 
two  days  after,  the  Channel  sea  was  reported  stormy.  All 
her  plans  were  shattered  and  she  had  stayed  on.  She  was 
still  staying  on.  In  a  spasm  of  spite  he  telegraphed  the 
dire  news  to  her.  Then  he  went  down  to  Windsor,  all 
a-quiver,  to  see  that  Mr.  Mainwearing  did  not  make  a  fool 
of  himself,  and  to  help  him  with  the  inquest  on  Peter  as  soon 
as  the  body  was  recovered. 

His  telegram  did  have  a  very  considerable  effect  upon 
Lady  Charlotte,  the  more  so  as  it  arrived  within  an  hour  or 
so  of  a  letter  from  Mrs.  Pybus  containing  some  very  dis- 
concerting news  about  Joan.  At  midday  came  Mr.  Main- 
wearing 's  story — pitched  to  a  high  note  of  Anglican  piety. 
The  body,  he  said,  was  still  not  found,  ''but  we  must  hope 
for  the  best."  When  Mr.  Sycamore  arrived  at  Chastlands 
in  the  afternoon  he  found  Lady  Charlotte  immensely  spread 
out  in  her  drawing-room  as  an  invalid,  with  Unwin  on  guard 
behind  her.  She  lay,  a  large  bundle  of  ribbon,  lace,  and  dis- 
tresses, upon  a  sofa ;  she  had  hoisted  an  enormous  beribboned 
lace  cap  with  black-and-gold  bows.  On  a  table  close  at  hand 
were  a  scent-bottle,  smelling-salts,  camphor,  menthol,  and 
suchlike  aids.  There  were  also  a  few  choice  black  grapes 
and  a  tonic.  She  meant  to  make  a  brave  fight  for  it. 

Mr.  Sycamore  was  not  aware  how  very  dead  Peter  was  at 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      197 

Chastlands  and  Windsor,  seeing  that  he  was  now  also  at 
The  Ingle-Nook  in  a  state  of  considerable  vitality.  It  was 
some  moments  before  he  realized  this  localized  demise.  In- 
deed it  was  upon  an  entirely  different  aspect  of  this  War  of. 
the  Guardians  that  he  was  now  visiting  the  enemy  camp. 

At  first  there  was  a  little  difficulty  made  about  admitting 
him.  Cashel  explained  that  Lady  Charlotte  was  "much  up- 
set. Terribly  upset."  Finally  he  found  himself  in  her 
large  presence. 

She  gave  him  no  time  to  speak. 

"I  am  ill,  Mr.  Sycamore.  I  am  in  a  wretched  state.  Prop-- 
erly  I  should  be  in  bed  now.  I  have  been  unable  to  travel 
abroad  to  rest.  I  have  been  totally  unable  to  attend  to 
affairs.  And  now  comes  this  last  blow.  Terrible!  A  judg- 
ment." 

"I  was  not  aware,  Lady  Charlotte,  that  you  knew,"  Mr. 
Sycamore  began. 

"Of  course  I  know.  Telegrams,  letters.  No  attempt  to 
break  it  to  me.  The  brutal  truth.  I  cannot  tell  you  how  I 
deplore  my  supineness  that  has  led  to  this  catastrophe." 

"Hardly  supine,"  Mr.  Sycamore  ventured. 

"Yes,  supine.  If  I  had  taken  up  my  responsibilities  years 
ago — when  these  poor  children  were  christened,  none  of  this 
might  have  happened.  Nothing." 

Mr.  Sycamore  perceived  that  he  was  in  the  presence  of 
something  more  than  mere  fuss  about  Peter's  running  away. 
A  wary  gleam  came  into  his  spectacles. 

"Perhaps,  Lady  Charlotte,  if  I  could  see  your  telegram,"" 
he  said. 

"Give  it  him,  Unwin, "  she  said. 

"Stole  a  boat — carried  over  a  weir,"  he  read.  "But  this, 
is  terrible!  I  had  no  idea." 

"Give  him  the  letter.     No — not  that  one.     The  other." 

"Body  not  yet  recovered,"  he  read,  and  commented  with 
confidence,  "It  will  turn  up  later,  I  feel  sure.  Of  course,  all' 
this  is — news  to  me;  boat — weir — everything.  Yes." 

"And  I  was  ill  already!"  said  Lady  Charlotte.  "There 
is  reason  to  suppose  my  heart  is  weak.  I  use  myself  too 
hard.  I  am  too  concerned  about  many  things.  I  cannot  live 
for  myself  alone.  It  is  not  my  nature.  The  doctor  had  com- 


198  JOAN  AND  PETER 

manded  a  quiet  month  here  before  I  even  thought  of  travel — 
literally  commanded.  And  then  comes  this  blow.  The 
wretched  child  could  not  have  chosen  a  worse  time." 

She  gave  a  gesture  of  despair.  She  fell  back  upon  her 
piled  pillows  with  a  gesture  of  furious  exhaustion. 

"In  the  last  twenty-four  hours,"  she  said,  "I  have  eaten 
one  egg,  Mr.  Sycamore.  .  .  .  And  some  of  that  I  left. ' ' 

Mr.  Sycamore's  note  of  sympathy  was  perhaps  a  little 
insincere.  "Of  course,"  he  said,  "in  taking  the  children 
away  from  their  school — where  they  were  at  least  safe  and 
happy — you  undertook  a  considerable  responsibility. ' ' 

Lady  Charlotte  took  him  up  with  emphasis.  "I  admit  no 
responsibility — none  whatever.  Understand,  Mr.  Sycamore, 
once  for  all,  I  am  not  responsible  for — whatever  has  happened 
to  this  wretched  little  boy.  Sorry  for  him — yes,  but  I  have 
nothing  to  regret.  I  took  him  away  from — undesirable  sur- 
roundings— and  sent  him  to  a  school,  by  no  means  a  cheap 
school,  that  was  recommended  very  highly,  very  highly  in- 
deed, by  Mr.  Grimes.  It  was  my  plain  duty  to  do  as  much. 
There  my  responsibility  ends." 

Mr.  Sycamore  had  drifted  quietly  into  a  chair,  and  was 
sitting  obliquely  to  her  in  an  attitude  more  becoming  a  family 
doctor  than  a  hostile  lawyer.  He  regarded  the  cornice  in 
the  far  corner  of  the  room  as  she  spoke,  and  replied  without 
looking  at  her,  softly  and  almost  as  if  in  soliloquy :  "Legally 
— no." 

"I  am  not  responsible,"  the  lady  repeated.  "If  any  one 
is  responsible,  it  is  Mr.  Grimes." 

"I  came  to  ask  you  to  produce  your  two  wards,"  said  Mr. 
Sycamore  abruptly,  "because  Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham  lands 
at  Southampton  tonight." 

"He  has  always  been  coming." 

"This  time  he  has  come." 

"If  he  had  come  earlier  all  this  would  not  have  happened. 
Has  he  really  come?" 

"He  is  here — in  England,  that  is." 

Lady  Charlotte  gasped  and  lay  back.  Unwin  handed  her 
the  bottle  of  smelling-salts.  "I  have  done  nothing  more  than 
my  duty,"  she  said. 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      199 

Mr.  Sycamore  became  more  gentle  in  his  manner  than 
ever.  "As  the  person  finally  responsible — " 

"Not" 

"Haven't  you  been  just  a  little  careless?" 

"Mr.  Sycamore,  it  was  this  boy  who  was  careless.  I  am 
sorry  to  say  it  now  that  he —  I  can  only  hope  that  at  the 
last —  But  he  was  not  a  good  boy.  Anything  but  a  good 
boy.  He  had  been  altogether  demoralized  by  those  mad, 
violent  creatures.  He  ran  away  from  this  school,  an  excel- 
lent school,  highly  recommended.  And  you  must  remember, 
Mr.  Sycamore,  that  I  was  paying  for  it.  The  abnormal  posi- 
tion of  the  property,  the  way  in  which  apparently  all  the 
income  is  to  be  paid  over  to  these  women — without  consulting 
me.  Well,  I  won't  complain  of  that  now.  I  was  prepared 
to  pay.  I  paid.  But  the  boy  was  already  thoroughly  cor- 
rupted. His  character  was  undermined.  He  ran  away.  I 
wash  my  hands  of  the  consequences." 

Mr.  Sycamore  was  on  the  point  of  saying  something  and 
thought  better  of  it. 

"At  any  rate,"  he  said,  "I  have  to  ask  you  on  behalf  of 
Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham  to  produce  the  other  child — the  girl. n 

"She  can't  be  produced,"  said  Lady  Charlotte  desperately. 

"That  really  does  make  things  serious." 

' '  Oh,  don 't  misunderstand  me !     The  child  is  in  excellent 
hands — excellent  hands.     But  there  are — neighbours.     She 
was  told  to  keep  indoors,  carefully  told.     What  must  she  do 
but  rush  out  at  the  first  chance !     She  had  had  fair  warning" 
that  there  were  measles  about,  she  had  had  measles  explained 
to  her  carefully,  yet  she  must  needs  go  and  make  friends  with 
a  lot  of  dirty  little  wretches!" 
'And  catch  measles." 
'Exactly." 
'That's  why—?" 
'That's  why—" 

'There  again,  Lady  Charlotte,  and  again  with  all  due 
respect,  haven't  you  been  just  a  little  careless?  At  that 
nice,  airy  school  in  Surrey  there  was  never  any  contagion — 
of  any  sort." 

' '  There  was  no  proper  religious  teaching. ' ' 


200  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Was  there  any  where  you  placed  these  children?" 

"I  was  led  to  believe — " 

She  left  it  at  that. 

Mr.  Sycamore  allowed  himself  to  point  the  moral.  "It  is 
a  very  remarkable  thing  to  me,  Lady  Charlotte,  most  remark- 
able, that  Catholic  people  and  Church  of  England  people — 
you  must  forgive  me  for  saying  it — and  religious  bodies  gen- 
erally should  be  so  very  anxious  and  energetic  to  get  control 
of  the  education  of  children  and  so  careless — indeed  they  are 
dreadfully  careless — of  the  tone,  the  wholesomeness  and  the 
quality  of  the  education  they  supply.  And  of  the  homes 
they  permit.  It's  almost  as  if  they  cared  more  for  getting 
the  children  branded  than  whether  they  lived  or  died." 

"The  school  was  an  excellent  school,"  said  Lady  Charlotte; 
"an  excellent  school.  Your  remarks  are  cruel  and  painful." 

Mr.  Sycamore  again  restrained  some  retort.  Then  he  said, 
"I  think  it  would  be  well  for  Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham  to  have 
the  address  of  the  little  girl." 

Lady  Charlotte  considered.  ' '  There  is  nothing  to  conceal, ' ' 
she  said,  and  gave  the  address  of  Mrs.  Pybus,  "a  most  trust- 
worthy woman. ' '  Mr.  Sycamore  took  it  down  very  carefully 
in  a  little  note-book  that  came  out  of  his  vest  pocket.  Then 
he  seemed  to  consider  whether  he  should  become  more  offen- 
.sive  or  not,  and  to  decide  upon  the  former  alternative. 

"I  suppose,"  he  said  reflectively  as  he  replaced  the  little 
book,  "that  the  demand  for  religious  observances  and  re- 
ligious orthodoxy  as  a  first  condition  in  schools  is  productive 
of  more  hypocrisy  and  rottenness  in  education  than  any  other 
.single  cause.  It  is  a  matter  of  common  observation.  A 
school  is  generally  about  as  inefficient  as  its  religious  stripe 
is  marked.  I  suppose  it  is  because  if  you  put  the  weight  on 
one  thing  you  cannot  put  it  on  another.  Or  perhaps  it  is 
because  no  test  is  so  easy  for  a  thoroughly  mean  and  dishonest 
person  to  satisfy  as  a  religious  test.  Schools  which  have  no 
•claims  to  any  other  merit  can  always  pass  themselves  off  as 
severely  religious.  Perhaps  the  truth  is  that  all  bad  schools 
profess  orthodoxy  rather  than  that  orthodoxy  makes  bad 
schools.  Nowadays  it  is  religion  that  is  the  last  refuge  of  a 
scoundrel." 

"If  you  have  nothing  further  to  say  than  this  Secularist 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      201 

lecturing,"  said  Lady  Charlotte  with  great  dignity,  "I 
should  be  obliged  if  you  would  find  somewhere — some  Hall 
of  Science — .  .  .  Considering  what  my  feelings  must  be.  .  . 
Scarcely  in  the  mood  for — blasphemies." 

"Itady  Charlotte,"  said  Mr.  Sycamore,  betraying  a  note  of 
indignation  in  his  voice;  "this  school  into  which  you  flung 
your  little  ward  was  a  very  badly  conducted  school  indeed. ' ' 

' '  It  was  nothing  of  the  sort, ' '  said  Lady  Charlotte.  ' '  How 
dare  you  reproach  me  ? " 

Mr.  Sycamore  went  on  as  though  she  had  not  spoken. 
''There  was  a  lot  of  bullying  and  nasty  behaviour  among 
the  boys,  and  the  masters  inflicted  punishments  without 
rhyme  or  reason." 

"How  can  you  know  anything  of  the  sort?" 

"On  the  best  authority — the  boy's." 

"But  how  could  he—" 

"He  was  thrashed  absurdly  and  set  an  impossible  task  for 
not  answering  to  a  silly  nickname.  There  was  no  one  to 
whom  he  could  complain.  He  ran  away.  He  had  an  idea 
of  reaching  Limpsfield,  but  when  he  realized  that  night  was 
coming  on,  being  really  a  very  sensible  little  boy,  he  selected 
a  kindly-looking  house,  asked  to  see  the  lady  of  the  house, 
and  told  her  he  had  run  away  from  home  and  wanted  to  go 
back.  He  gave  his  aunt's  address  at  The  Ingle-Nook,  and  he 
was  sent  home  in  the  morning.  He  arrived  home  this 
morning." 

Lady  Charlotte  made  a  strange  noise,  but  Mr.  Sycamore 
hurried  on.  ' '  How  this  delusion  about  a  boat  and  a  weir  got 
into  the  story  I  don't  know.  He  says  nothing  about  them. 
Indeed,  he  says  very  little  about  anything.  He's  a  reserved 
little  boy.  We  have  to  get  what  we  can  out  of  him. ' ' 

"You  mean  to  say  that  the  boy  is  still  alive!"  cried  Lady 
Charlotte. 

"Happily!" 

"In  face  of  these  telegrams!" 

"I  saw  him  not  two  hours  ago." 

"But  how  do  you  account  for  these  telegrams  and  letters?" 

Mr.  Sycamore  positively  tittered.  "That's  for  Mr.  Grimes 
to  explain." 

"And  he  is  alive — and  unhurt?" 


JOAN  AND  PETER 

' '  As  fresh  as  paint ;  and  quite  happy. ' ' 

"Then  if  ever  a  little  boy  deserved  a  whipping,  a  thor- 
oughly good  whipping,"  cried  Lady  Charlotte,  "it  is  Master 
Peter  Stubland !  Safe,  indeed !  It's  outrageous!  After  all 
I  have  gone  through !  Unwin ! ' ' 

Unwiu  handed  the  salts. 

Mr.  Sycamore  stood  up.  He  still  had  the  essence  of  his 
business  to  communicate,  but  there  was  something  in  the 
great  lady's  blue  eyes  that  made  him  want  to  stand  up. 
And  that  little  tussock  of  fair  hair  on  her  cheek — in  some 
indescribable  way  it  had  become  tierce. 

"To  think,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  "that  I  have  been  put 
to  all  this  unutterable  worry  and  distress — " 

She  was  at  a  loss  for  words.  Mr.  Sycamore  appreciated 
the  fact  that  if  he  had  anything  more  to  say  to  her  he  must 
communicate  it  before  the  storm  burst.  He  stroked  his  chin 
thoughtfully,  and  began  to  deliver  his  message  with  just  the 
faintest  quality  of  hurry  in  his  delivery. 

"The  real  business  upon  which  I  came  to  you  today,  Lady 
Charlotte,  has  really  nothing  to  do  with  this — escapade  at  all. 
It  is  something  else.  Things  have  arisen  that  alter  the  out- 
look for  those  children  very  considerably.  There  is  every 
reason  to  suppose  that  neither  you  nor  the  Misses  Stubland 
are  properly  guardians  of  Joan  and  Peter  at  all.  No.  One 
moment  more,  Lady  Charlotte;  let  me  explain.  Two  young 
Germans,  it  would  appear,  witnessed  the  accident  to  the  boat 
from  the  top  of  the  Capri  headland.  They  saw  Mr.  Stub- 
land  apparently  wrestling  with  the  boatman,  then  the  boat 
overset  and  the  two  men  never  reappeared.  They  must  have 
dragged  each  other  down.  The  witnesses  are  quite  certain 
about  that.  But  Mrs.  Stubland,  poor  young  lady,  could  be 
seen  swimming  for  quite  a  long  time ;  she  swam  nearly  half- 
way to  land  before  she  gave  in,  although  the  water  was  very 
choppy  indeed.  I  made  enquiries  when  I  was  in  Naples  this 
spring,  and  I  do  not  think  there  would  be  much  trouble  in 
producing  those  witnesses  still.  They  were  part  of  the — 
what  shall  I  call  it? — social  circle  of  that  man  Krupp,  the 
gunmaker.  He  lived  at  Capri.  If  we  accept  this  story,  then, 
Lady  Charlotte,  Mrs.  Stubland 's  will  holds  good,  and  her 


THE  HIGH  CROSS  PREPARATORY  SCHOOL      203 

husband's  does  not,  and  Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham  becomes  the 
sole  guardian  of  the  children.  ..." 

He  paused.  The  lady's  square  face  slowly  assumed  an 
expression  of  dignified  satisfaction. 

"So  long  as  those  poor  children  are  rescued  from  those 
women,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  "my  task  is  done.  I  do  not 
grudge  any  exertion,  any  sacrifice  I  have  made,  so  long  as  that 
end  is  secured.  I  do  not  look  for  thanks.  Much  less  repay- 
ment. Perhaps  some  day  these  children  may  come  to  under- 
stand—" 

Unwin  made  a  sound  like  the  responses  in  church. 

"I  would  go  through  it  all  again,"  said  Lady  Charlotte — 
"willingly.  .  .  Now  that  my  nephew  has  returned  I  have 
no  more  anxiety."  She  made  an  elegant  early-Georgian 
movement  with  the  smelling-salts.  "I  am  completely  justi- 
fied. I  have  been  slighted,  tricked,  threatened,  insulted, 
made  ill  ...  but  I  am  justified." 

She  resorted  again  to  the  salts. 


CHAPTER  THE  NINTH 

OSWALD   TAKES   CONTROL 
§    1 

WHILE  Mr.  Sycamore  was  regaling  himself  with  the 
discomfiture  of  Lady  Charlotte,  Oswald  Syden- 
ham  was  already  walking  about  the  West  End 
of  London. 

He  had  come  upon  a  fresh  crisis  in  his  life.  He  was  doing 
his  best  to  accept  some  thoroughly  disagreeable  limitations. 
Hi§  London  specialist  had  but  confirmed  his  own  conviction. 
It  was  no  longer  possible  for  him  to  continue  in  Africa.  He 
had  reached  the  maximum  of  blackwater  fever  permitted  to 
normal  men.  The  next  bout — if  there  was  a  next  bout — 
would  kill  him.  In  addition  to  this  very  valid  reason  for  a 
return,  certain  small  fragments  of  that  Egyptian  shell  long 
dormant  in  his  arm  had  awakened  to  mischief,  and  had  to 
be  removed  under  the  more  favourable  conditions  to  be  found 
in  England.  He  had  come  back  therefore  to  a  land  where 
he  had  now  no  close  friends  and  no  special  occupations,  and 
once  more  he  had  to  begin  life  afresh. 

lie  had  returned  with  extreme  reluctance.  He  could  not 
see  anything  ahead  of  him  in  England  that  gripped  his 
imagination  at  all.  He  was  strongly  tempted  to  have  his  arm 
patched  up,  and  return  to  Africa  for  a  last  spell  of  work 
and  a  last  conclusive  dose  of  the  fever  germ.  But  in  Eng- 
land he  might  be  of  use  for  a  longer  period,  and  a  kind  of 
godless  conscience  in  him  insisted  that  there  must  be  no  de- 
liberate waste  in  his  disposal  of  his  life. 

For  some  time  he  had  been  distressed  by  the  general  ig- 
norance in  England  of  the  realities  of  things  African,  and 
by  the  general  coarsening  and  deterioration,  as  he  held  it  to 
be,  of  the  Imperial  idea.  There  was  much  over  here  that 

204 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  205 

needed  looking  into,  he  felt,  and  when  it  was  looked  into 
then  the  indications  for  further  work  might  appear.  Why 
not,  so  far  as  his  powers  permitted,  do  something  in  helping 
English  people  to  realize  all  that  Africa  was  and  might  be. 
That  was  work  he  might  do,  and  live.  In  Africa  there  was 
little  more  for  him  to  do  but  die. 

That  was  all  very  well  in  theory.  It  did  not  alter  his 
persuasion  that  he  was  going  to  be  intolerably  lonely  if  he 
stayed  on  in  England.  Out  there  were  the  Chief  Commis- 
sioner and  Muir  and  half  a  dozen  other  people  for  whom  he 
had  developed  a  strong  affection ;  he  was  used  to  his  native 
servants  and  he  liked  them ;  he  had  his  round  of  intensely  in- 
teresting activities,  he  was  accustomed  to  the  life.  Out  there, 
too,  there  was  sunshine.  Such  sunshine  as  the  temperate 
zone  can  never  reproduce.  This  English  world  was  a  grey, 
draughty,  cloudy,  lonely  world,  and  one  could  not  always  be 
working.  That  sunshine  alone  meant  a  vast  deprivation. 

Tli  is  sort  of  work  he  thought  of  doing  and  which  seemed 
the  only  thing  now  that  he  could  possibly  do,  wasn't,  he 
reflected  uncomfortably,  by  any  means  the  work  that  he  could 
do  best.  He  knew  he  was  bad-tempered.  Ill-health  intensi- 
fied a  natural  irritability.  He  knew  his  brain  was  now  a 
very  uncertain  instrument,  sometimes  quite  good,  sometimes 
a  weary  fount  of  half-formed  ideas  and  indecisions.  As  an 
advocate  of  the  right  way  in  Africa,  he  would  do  some  good 
no  doubt;  but  he  would  certainly  get  into  some  tiresome 
squabbles,  he  would  bark  his  knuckles  and  bruise  his  shins. 
Nevertheless — cheerless  though  the  outlook  was — it  was,  he 
felt,  the  work  he  aught  to  do. 

"Pump  up  enthusiasm,"  said  Oswald.  "Begin  again. 
What  else  can  I  do  ? " 

But  what  he  was  pumping  up  that  afternoon  in  London 
was  really  far  more  like  anger.  Rage  and  swearing  were  the 
natural  secretions  of  Oswald's  mind  at  every  season  of  per- 
plexity; he  became  angry  when  other  types  would  be  de- 
spondent. Where  melancholic  men  abandon  effort,  men  of 
the  choleric  type  take  to  kicking  and  smashing.  Where  the 
former  contract,  the  latter  beat  about  and  spread  themselves. 
Oswald,  beneath  his  superficial  resignation,  was  working  up 
for  a  quarrel  with  something.  His  instinct  was  to  convert 


206  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  distress  of  his  developing  physical  insufficiencies  into  hos- 
tility to  some  external  antagonist. 

lie  knew  of,  and  he  was  doing  his  best  to  control,  this 
black  urgency  to  violent  thoughts  and  conclusions.  He 
wanted  to  kick  and  he  knew  he  must  not  yet  waste  energy  in 
kicking.  He  was  not  justified  in  kicking.  He  must  not  al- 
low his  sense  of  personal  grievance  against  fate  to  disturb  his 
mind.  lie  must  behave  with  a  studied  calm  and  aloofness. 

"Damn!"  said  Oswald,  no  doubt  by  way  of  endorsing 
this  decision. 

Pursuant  to  these  virtuous  resolutions  this  tall,  lean, 
thwarted  man,  full  of  jealous  solicitude  for  the  empire  he 
had  helped  enlarge,  this  disfigured  man  whose  face  was  in 
two  halves  like  those  partially  treated  portraits  one  sees  out- 
side the  shops  of  picture-cleaners,  was  engaged  in  comport- 
ing himself  as  much  as  possible  like  some  pleasant,  leisurely 
man  of  the  world  with  no  obligation  or  concern  but  to  make 
himself  comfortable  and  find  amusement  in  things  about  him. 
He  was  doing  his  best  to  feel  that  there  was  no  hurry  about 
anything,  and  no  reason  whatever  for  getting  into  a  state 
of  mind.  Just  a  calm  quiet  onlooker  he  had  to  be.  He  was, 
he  told  himself,  taking  a  look  round  London  as  a  preliminary 
to  settling  down  there.  Perhaps  he  was  going  to  settle  down 
in  London.  Or  perhaps  in  the  country  somewhere.  It  did 
not  matter  which — whichever  was  the  most  pleasant.  It  was 
all  very  pleasant.  Very  pleasant  indeed.  A  life  now  of 
wise  lounging  and  judicious,  temperate  activities  it  had  to  be. 
He  must  not  fuss. 

He  had  arrived  in  England  the  day  before,  but  as  yet, 
except  for  a  brief  note  to  Mr.  Sycamore,  he  had  notified  no 
one  of  his  return.  He  had  put  up  at  the  Climax  Club  in 
Piccadilly,  a  proprietary  club  that  was  half  hotel,  where  one 
could  get  a  sitting-room  as  well  as  a  bedroom ;  and  after  a 
visit  to  his  doctor — a  visit  that  confirmed  all  his  worst  ap- 
prehensions of  the  need  of  abandoning  Africa  for  ever — he 
had  spent  the  evening  in  the  club  trying  to  be  oalm  over  the 
newspapers  and  magazines.  But  when  one  is  ill  and  tired  as 
Oswald  was,  all  that  one  reads  in  the  newspapers  and  maga- 
zines is  wrong  and  exasperating. 

It  was  1903;  the  time  when  Mr.  Joseph  Chamberlain  re- 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  207 

turned  from  South  Africa  to  launch  his  Tariff  Reform  agi- 
tation— and  Oswald  was  temperamentally  a  Free  Trader. 
The  whole  press,  daily,  weekly,  monthly,  was  full  of  the 
noises  of  the  controversy.  It  impressed  him  as  a  contro- 
versy almost  intolerably  mean.  His  Imperialism  was  essen- 
tially a  romantic  and  generous  imagination,  a  dream  of 
service,  of  himself,  serving  the  Empire  and  of  the  Empire 
serving  mankind.  The  tacit  assumption  underlying  this  most 
sordid  of  political  campaigns  that  the  Empire  was  really 
nothing  of  the  kind,  that  it  was  an  adventure  of  exploitation, 
a  national  enterprise  in  the  higher  piracy,  borrowing  a  faded 
picturesqueuess  from  the  scoundrelism  of  the  Elizabethan 
and  Jacobean  buccaneers,  the  men  who  started  the  British 
slave  trade  and  the  Ulster  trouble  and  founded  no  Empire  at 
all  except  the  plantations  of  Virginia  and  Barbados,  dis- 
tressed and  perplexed  his  mind  almost  unendurably.  It  was 
so  maddeningly  plausible.  It  was  so  manifestly  the  pathway 
of  destruction. 

After  throwing  The  National  Review  into  a  distant  arm- 
chair and  then,  when  he  met  the  startled  eye  of  a  fellow 
member,  trying  to  look  as  though  that  was  his  usual  way 
with  a  magaxine,  he  sought  distraction  in  Southey's  "Doc- 
tor," which  happened  to  be  in  the  club  library.  After  din- 
ner he  went  out  for  a  stroll  in  the  West  End,  and  visited  the 
Alhambra.  He  found  that  more  soothing  than  the  papers. 
The  old  excitement  of  the  human  moth  at  the  candles  of  vice 
he  no  longer  felt.  He  wondered  why  these  flitting  allure- 
ments had  ever  stirred  him.  But  he  liked  the  stir  and  the 
lights  and  the  pleasant  inconsecutive  imbecility  of  the  enter- 
tainment. 

He  slept  fairly  well.  In  the  morning  a  clerk  of  Mr. 
Sycamore's  telephoned  to  say  that  that  gentleman  was  out 
of  town,  he  had  been  called  down  to  see  Lady  Charlotte 
Sydenham,  but  that  he  would  be  back,  and  would  probably 
try  to  "get"  Oswald  about  eleven  in  the  evening.  He  had 
something  important  to  tell  Oswald.  The  day  began  cloudy, 
and  repented  and  became  fine.  By  midday  it  was,  for  Lon- 
don, a  golden  day.  Yet  to  Oswald  it  seemed  but  a  weak 
solution  of  sunshine.  If  you  stood  bareheaded  in  such  sun- 
shine you  would  catch  a  chill.  But  he  made  the  best  of  it. 


208  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"October  mild  and  boon,"  he  quoted.  He  assured  himself 
that  it  would  be  entertaining  to  stroll  about  the  West  End 
and  look  at  the  shops  and  mark  the  changes  in  things.  He 
breakfasted  late  at  one  of  the  windows  overlooking  the 
Green  Park,  visited  the  club  barber,  walked  along  to  his 
tailor,  bought  three  new  hats  and  a  stout  gold-banded  cane 
with  an  agate  top  in  Bond  Street,  a  pair  of  boots,  gloves  and 
other  sundries.  Then  he  went  into  his  second  club,  the  Plan- 
tain, in  Pall  Mall,  to  read  the  papers — until  he  discovered 
that  he  was  beginning  to  worry  about  Tariff  Reform  again. 
He  saw  no  one  he  knew,  and  lunched  alone.  In  the  afternoon 
he  strolled  out  into  London  once  more. 

He  was,  he  found,  no  longer  uncomfortable  and  self-con- 
scious in  the  streets  of  London.  His  one-sided,  blank-sided 
face  did  not  make  him  self-conscious  now  as  it  used  to  do, 
he  had  reconciled  himself  to  his  disfigurement.  If  at  first 
he  had  exaggerated  its  eft'ect,  he  now  inclined  to  forget  it 
altogether.  He  wore  hats  nowadays  with  a  good  broad  brim, 
and  cocked  them  to  over-shadow  the  missing  eye;  his  dark 
moustache  had  grown  and  was  thick  and  symmetrical;  he 
had  acquired  the  habit  of  looking  at  himself  in  glasses  so  as 
to  minimize  his  defaced  half.  It  seemed  to  him  a  natural 
thing  now  that  the  casual  passer-by  should  pull  up  for  the 
fraction  of  a  second  at  the  sight  of  his  tall  figure,  or  look 
back  at  him  as  if  to  verify  a  first  impression.  Didn  't  people 
do  that  to  everybody  ? 

He  went  along  Pall  Mall,  whose  high  gentility  was  still  in 
those  days  untroubled  by  the  Royal  Automobile  Club  and 
scarcely  ruffled  by  a  discreet  shop  or  so ;  he  turned  up  through 
St.  James's  Street  to  Piccadilly  with  a  reminiscent  glance  by 
the  way  down  Jermyn  Street,  where  he  had  had  his  first  ex- 
periences of  restaurants  and  suchlike  dissipations  in  his  early 
midshipman  days.  How  far  away  those  follies  seemed  now ! 
The  shops  of  Bond  Street  drew  him  northward;  the  Dore 
Gallery  of  his  childhood,  he  noted,  was  still  going  on ;  he 
prowled  along  Oxford  Street  as  far  as  the  Marble  Arch — 
Gillows  was  still  Gillows  in  those  days,  and  Selfridge  had  yet 
to  dawn  on  the  London  world — and  beat  back  by  wray  of 
Seymour  Street  to  Regent  Street.  He  nodded  to  Verrey's, 
where  long  ago  he  had  lunched  in  a  short  plaid  frock  and 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  209 

white  socks  under  the  auspices  of  his  godmother,  old  Lady 
Percival  Pelham.  It  was  all  very  much  as  he  had  left  it  in 
'97.  That  fever  of  rebuilding  and  rearrangement  which  was 
already  wrecking  the  old  Strand  and  sweeping  away  Book- 
sellers '  Row  and  the  Drury  Lane  slums  and  a  score  of  ancient 
landmarks,  had  not  yet  reached  the  West  End.  There  was 
the  same  abundance  of  smart  hansom  cabs  crawling  in  the 
streets  or  neatly  ranked  on  the  stands;  the  same  populous 
horse  omnibuses,  the  same  brightly  dressed  people,  and,  in 
Regent  Street  and  Piccadilly,  the  same  too-brightly-dressed 
women  loiterers,  only  now  most  of  them  were  visibly  coarse 
and  painted ;  there  were  the  same  mendicants  and  sandwich- 
men  at  the  pavement  edge.  Perhaps  there  were  more  om- 
nibuses crowding  upon  one  another  at  Piccadilly  and  Oxford 
Circuses,  and  more  people  everywhere.  Or  perhaps  that  was 
only  the  effect  of  returning  from  a  less  crowded  world. 

Now  and  then  he  saw  automobiles,  queer,  clumsy  carriages 
without  horses  they  seemed  to  be,  or  else  low,  heavy-looking 
vehicles  with  a  flavour  of  battleship  about  them.  Several 
emitted  bluish  smoke  and  trailed  an  evil  smell.  In  Regent 
Street  outside  Liberty's  art  shop  one  of  these  mechanical 
novelties  was  in  trouble.  Everybody  seemed  pleased.  The 
passing  cabmen  were  openly  derisive.  Oswald  joined  the  lit- 
tle group  of  people  at  the  pavement  edge  who  were  watching 
the  heated  and  bothered  driver  engaged  in  some  obscure 
struggle  beneath  his  car. 

An  old  gentleman  in  a  white  waistcoat  stood  beside  Oswald, 
and  presently  turned  to  him. 

"Silly  things,"  he  said.  "Noisy,  dangerous,  stinking 
things.  They  ought  to  be  forbidden."  . 

"Perhaps  they  will  improve,"  said  Oswald. 

"How  could  that  thing  improve?"  asked  the  old  gentle- 
man. "Lotto  dirty  ironmongery." 

He  turned  away  with  the  air  of  a  man  for  whom  a  question 
had  been  settled.  Oswald  followed  him  thoughtfully.  .  . 

He  resumed  his  identifications.  Piccadilly  Circus!  Here 
was  the  good  old  Cafe  Monico ;  yonder  the  Criterion.  .  . 

But  everything  seemed  smaller. 

That  was  the  thing  that  struck  him  most  forcibly ;  London 
revisited  he  discovered  to  be  an  intense  little  place. 


210  JOAN  AND  PETER 

It  was  extraordinary  that  this  should  be  the  head  of  the 
Empire.  It  seemed,  when  one  came  back  to  it,  so  entirely 
indifferent  to  the  Empire,  so  entirely  self-absorbed.  When 
one  was  out  beyond  there,  in  Uganda,  East  Africa,  Sudan, 
Egypt,  in  all  those  vast  regions  where  the  British  were  doing 
the  best  work  they  had  ever  done  in  pacification  and  civiliza- 
tion, one  thought  of  London  as  if  it  were  a  great  head  that 
watched  one  from  afar,  that  could  hear  a  cry  for  help,  that 
could  send  support.  Yet  here  were  these  people  in  these 
narrow,  brightly  served  streets,  very  busy  about  their  own 
affairs,  almost  as  busy  and  self-absorbed  as  the  white-robed 
crowd  in  the  big  market-place  in  Mengo,  and  conspicuously, 
remarkably  not  thinking  of  Africa — or  anything  of  the  sort. 
He  compared  Bond  Street  and  its  crowded,  inconvenient 
side-walks  with  one  of  the  great  garden  vistas  of  the  Uganda 
capital,  much  to  the  advantage  of  the  latter.  He  descended 
by  the  Duke  of  York's  steps,  past  the  old  milk  stall  with  its 
cow,  into  the  Mall.  Buckingham  Palace,  far  away,  was  much 
less  impressive  than  the  fort  at  Kampala  on  its  commanding 
hill;  the  vegetation  of  St.  James's  Park  and  its  iron  fencing 
were  a  poor  substitute  for  the  rich-patterned  reed  palisades 
and  the  wealth  of  fronds  that  bordered  the  wide  prospects  of 
the  Uganda  capital.  All  English  trees  looked  stunted  to 
Oswald 's  eyes. 

Towards  the  palace,  tree-felling  was  in  progress,  the  felling 
of  trees  that  could  never  be  replaced ;  and  an  ugly  hoarding 
veiled  the  erection  of  King  Edward's  pious  memorial  to 
Queen  Victoria,  the  memorial  which  later  her  grandson,  the 
Kaiser,  was  to  unveil. 

He  went  on  into  Whitehall — there  was  no  Admiralty  Arch 
in  those  days,  and  one  came  out  of  the  Mall  by  way  of  Spring 
Gardens  round  the  corner  of  an  obtrusive  bank.  Oswald 
paused  for  a  minute  to  survey  the  squat  buildings  and  high 
column  of  Trafalgar  Square,  pale  amber  in  the  October  sun- 
shine, and  then  strolled  down  towards  Westminster.  He 
became  more  and  more  consciously  the  loitering  home-comer. 
He  smiled  at  the  mounted  soldiers  in  their  boxes  outside  the 
Horse  Guards,  paused  at  and  approved  of  the  architectural 
intentions  of  the  new  War  Office,  and  nodded  to  his  old 
friends,  the  Admiralty  and  the  Colonial  Office.  Here  they 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  211 

brewed  the  destinies  of  the  Old  World  outside  Europe  and 
kept  the  Seven  Seas.  He  played  his  part  with  increased  self- 
approval.  He  made  his  way  to  Westminster  Bridge  and 
spent  some  time  surveying  the  down  river  prospect.  It  was, 
after  all,  a  little  ditch  of  a  river.  St.  Paul's  was  fairly 
visible,  and  the  red,  rusty  shed  of  Charing  Cross  station  and 
its  brutal  iron  bridge,  fit  monument  of  the  clumsy  looting  by 
"private  enterprise"  that  characterized  the  Victorian  age, 
had  never  looked  uglier. 

He  crossed  from  one  side  of  the  bridge  to  the  other,  leant 
over  the  parapet  and  regarded  the  Houses  of  Parliament. 
The  flag  was  flying,  and  a  number  of  little  groups  of  silk- 
hatted  men  and  gaily  dressed  ladies  were  having  tea  on  the 
terrace. 

"I  wonder  why  we  rule  our  Empire  from  a  sham  Gothic 
building,"  thought  Oswald.  "If  anything,  it  ought  to  be 
Roman.  ..." 

He  turned  his  attention  to  the  traffic  and  the  passers-by. 
"They  don't  realize,"  he  said.  "Suppose  suddenly  they 
were  to  have  a  mirage  here  of  some  of  the  lands  and  cities 
this  old  Parliament  House  controls?" 

A  little  stout  man  driving  a  pony-trap  caught  his  attention. 
It  was  a  smart  new  pony-trap,  and  there  was  a  look  of  new 
clothes  about  its  driver ;  he  smoked  a  cigar  that  stuck  upward 
from  the  corner  of  his  mouth,  and  in  his  button-hole  was  a 
red  chry santhemum ;  his  whole  bearing  suggested  absolute 
contentment  with  himself  and  acquiescence  in  the  universe; 
he  handled  his  reins  and  drew  his  whip  across  the  flanks  of 
his  shining  cob  as  delicately  as  if  he  was  fly-fishing.  ' '  What 
does  he  think  he  is  up  to?"  asked  Oswald.  A  thousand 
times  he  had  seen  that  Sphinx  of  perfect  self-contentment  on 
passing  negro  faces. 

"The  Empire  doesn't  worry  him/'  said  Oswald. 


§  2 

It  was  worrying  Oswald  a  lot.  Everything  was  worrying 
Oswald  just  then.  It  is  a  subtle  question  to  answer  of  such 
cases  whether  the  physical  depression  shapes  the  despondent 


212  JOAN  AND  PETER 

thought,  or  whether  the  gnawing  doubt  prepares  the  nervous 
illness.  His  confidence  in  his  work  and  the  system  to  which 
he  belonged  had  vanished  by  imperceptible  degrees. 

For  some  years  he  had  gone  about  his  work  with  very  few 
doubts.  He  had  been  too  busy.  But  now  ill-health  had 
conspired  with  external  circumstances  to  expose  him  to  ques- 
tionings about  things  he  had  never  questioned  before.  They 
were  very  fundamental  doubts.  They  cut  at  the  roots  of  his 
life.  He  was  beginning  to  doubt  whether  the  Empire  was 
indeed  as  good  a  thing  and  as  great  a  thing  as  he  had  as- 
sumed it  to  be.  ...  The  Empire  to  which  his  life  had  been 
given. 

This  did  not  make  him  any  less  an  Imperialist  than  he  had 
been,  but  it  sharpened  his  imperialism  with  a  sense  of  urgency 
that  cut  into  his  mind. 

Altogether  Oswald  had  now  given  nearly  eighteen  years 
to  East  and  Central  Africa.  His  illness  had  called  a  halt  in 
a  very  busy  life.  For  two  years  and  more  after  his  last 
visit  to  England,  he  had  been  occupied  chiefly  in  operations 
in  and  beyond  the  Lango  country  against  Kabarega  and  the 
remnant  of  the  rebel  Sudanese.  He  had  assisted  in  the 
rounding-up  of  King  Mwanga,  the  rebel  king  of  Uganda,  and 
in  setting  up  the  child  king  and  the  regency  that  replaced 
him.  At  the  end  of  1899  his  former  chief,  Sir  Harry 
Johnston,  had  come  up  from  British  Central  Africa  as  Spe- 
cial Commissioner  to  Uganda,  and  the  work  of  land  settle- 
ment, of  provincial  organization,  of  railways  and  postal  de- 
velopment had  gone  on  apace.  Next  year  indeed  war  had 
come  again,  but  it  was  the  last  war  in  this  part  of  the  world 
for  some  time.  It  was  caused  by  the  obstinate  disposition 
of  the  Nandi  people  to  steal  the  copper  wire  from  the  tele- 
graph poles  that  had  been  set  up  in  their  country.  Hitherto 
their  chief  use  for  copper  wire  had  been  to  make  bracelets 
and  anklets  for  their  married  women.  They  were  shocked 
by  this  endless  stretching  out  of  attenuated  feminine  adorn- 
ment. They  did  their  best  to  restore  it  to  what  they  con- 
sidered was  its  proper  use.  It  was  a  homely  misunderstand- 
ing rather  than  a  war.  Oswald  had  led  that  expedition  to  a 
successful  explanation.  Thereafter  the  leading  fact  in  the 
history  of  Uganda  until  the  sleeping  sickness  came  had  been 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  213 

the  construction  of  the  railway  from  the  coast  to  Lake  Vic- 
toria Nyanza. 

In  Uganda  as  in  Nyasaland  Oswald  Sydenhara  had  found 
himself  part  of  a  rapid  and  busy  process  of  tidying  up  the 
world.  For  some  years  it  had  carried  him  along  and  deter- 
mined all  his  views. 

The  tidying-up  of  Africa  during  the  closing  years  of  the 
nineteenth  century  was  indeed  one  of  the  most  rapid  and 
effective  tidyings  up  in  history.  In  the  late  'eighties  the 
whole  of  Africa  from  the  frontiers  of  lower  Egypt  down  to 
Rhodesia  had  been  a  world  of  chaotic  adventure  and  misery ; 
a  black  world  of  insecure  barbarism  invaded  by  the  rifle,  and 
the  Arab  and  European  adventurers  who  brought  it.  There 
had  been  no  such  thing  as  a  school  from  Nubia  to  Rhodesia, 
and  everywhere  there  had  been  constant  aimless  bloodshed. 
Long  ages  of  conflict,  arbitrary  cruelty  and  instinctive  fierce- 
ness seemed  to  have  reached  a  culmination  of  destructive 
disorder.  The  increasing  light  that  fell  on  Africa  did  but 
illuminate  a  scene  of  collapse.  The  new  forces  that  were 
coming  into  the  country  appeared  at  first  as  hopelessly  blind 
and  cruel  as  the  old ;  the  only  difference  was  that  they  were 
better  armed.  The  Arab  was  frankly  a  slaver,  European  en- 
terprise was  deeply  interested  in  forced  labour.  The  first- 
fruits  of  Christianity  had  been  civil  war,  and  one  of  Oswald's 
earliest  experiences  of  Uganda  had  been  the  attack  of 
Mwanga  and  his  Roman  Catholic  adherents  upon  the  Angli- 
cans in  Mengo,  who  held  out  in  Lugard's  little  fort  and  ul- 
timately established  the  soundness  of  the  Elixabethan  com- 
promise by  means  of  a  Maxim  gun  It  was  never  a  confident 
outlook  for  many  years  anywhere  between  the  Zambesi  and 
the  Nile  cataracts.  Probably  no  honest  man  ever  worked  in 
west  and  central  Africa  between  1880  and  1900  who  escaped 
altogether  from  phases  of  absolute  despair;  who  did  not 
face  with  a  sinking  heart,  lust,  hatred,  cunning  and  treach- 
ery, black  intolerance  and  ruthless  aggression.  And  behind 
all  the  perversities  of  man  worked  the  wickedness  of  tropical 
Nature,  uncertain  in  her  moods,  frightful  in  her  storms,  fruit- 
ful of  strange  troubles  through  weed  and  parasite,  insect  and 
pestilence.  Yet  civilization  had  in  the  long  run  won  an  as- 
tonishing victory.  In  a  score  of  years,  so  endless  then,  so 


214  JOAN  AND  PETER 

brief  in  retrospect,  roads  that  had  been  decaying  tracks  or 
non-existent  were  made  safe  and  open  everywhere,  the  rail- 
way and  the  post  and  telegraph  came  to  stay,  vast  regions  of 
Africa  which  since  the  beginning  of  things  had  known  no 
rule  but  the  whim  and  arbitrary  power  of  transitory  chiefs 
and  kings,  awoke  to  the  conception  of  impartial  law;  war 
canoes  vanished  from  the  lakes  and  robber  tribes  learnt  to 
tend  their  own  cattle  and  cultivate  their  gardens.  And  now 
there  were  schools.  There  were  hospitals.  Perhaps  a  quar- 
ter of  a  million  young  people  in  Uganda  alone  could 
read  and  write;  the  percentage  of  literacy  in  Uganda  was 
rapidly  overtaking  that  in  India  and  Russia. 

On  the  face  of  it  this  was  enough  to  set  one  thinking  of 
the  whole  world  as  if  it  were  sweeping  forward  to  universal 
civilization  and  happiness.  For  some  years  that  had  been 
Oswald's  habit  of  mind.  It  had  been  his  sustaining  faith. 
He  had  gone  from  task  to  task  until  this  last  attack  of  black- 
water  fever  had  arrested  his  activities.  And  then  these 
doubts  displayed  themselves. 

From  South  Africa,  that  land  of  destiny  for  western 
civilization,  had  come  the  first  germ  of  his  doubting.  Sir 
Harry  Johnston,  Oswald's  chief,  a  frank  and  bitter  critic 
of  the  New  Imperialism  that  had  thrust  up  from  the  Cape 
to  Nyasaland  under  the  leadership  of  Cecil  Rhodes,  helped  to 
shape  and  point  his  scepticism.  The  older  tradition  of  the 
Empire  was  one  of  administration  regardless  of  profit, 
Johnston  declared ;  the  new  seemed  inspired  by  conceptions 
of  violent  and  hasty  gain.  The  Rhodes  example  had  set  all 
Africa  dancing  to  the  tune  of  crude  exploitation.  It  had 
fired  the  competitive  greed  of  the  King  of  the  Belgians  and 
unleashed  blood  and  torture  in  the  Congo  Free  State.  The 
Congo  State  had  begun  as  a  noble  experiment,  a  real  attempt 
at  international  compromise;  it  had  been  given  over  to  an 
unworthy  trustee  and  wrecked  hideously  by  his  ruthless 
profit-hunting.  All  over  the  Empire,  honest  administrators 
and  colonial  politicians,  friendly  explorers  and  the  mission- 
aries of  civilization,  were  becoming  more  and  more  acutely 
aware  of  a  heavy  acquisitive  thrust  behind  the  New  Imperial- 
ism. Usually  they  felt  it  first  in  the  treatment  of  the  natives. 
The  earlier  ill-treatment  of  the  native  came  from  the  local 


215 

trader,  the  local  planter,  the  white  rough;  now  as  that  sort 
of  thing  was  got  in  hand  and  men  could  begin  to  hope  for  a 
new  and  better  order,  came  extensive  schemes  from  Europe 
for  the  wholesale  detachment  of  the  native  from  his  land,  for 
the  wholesale  working  and  sweating  of  the  native  popula- 
tion. .  .  . 

Had  we  defeated  the  little  robbers  only  to  clear  the  way 
for  organized  imperial  robbery? 

Such  things  were  already  troubling  Oswald's  mind  before 
the  shock  of  the  South  African  war.  But  before  the  war 
they  amounted  to  criticisms  of  this  administration  or  that, 
they  were  still  untouched  by  any  doubts  of  the  general  Im- 
perial purpose  or  of  the  Empire  as  a  whole.  The  South 
African  war  laid  bare  an  amazing  and  terrifying  amount  of 
national  incompetence.  The  Empire  was  not  only  hustled 
into  a  war  for  which  there  was  no  occasion,  but  that  war  was 
planned  with  a  lack  of  intelligent  foresight  and  con- 
ducted with  a  lack  of  soundness  that  dismayed  every 
thoughtful  Englishman.  After  a  monstrous  wasteful  strug- 
gle the  national  resources  dragged  it  at  last  to  a  not  very 
decisive  victory.  The  outstanding  fact  became  evident  that 
the  British  army  tradition  was  far  gone  in  decay,  that  the 
army  was  feebly  organized  and  equipped,  and  that  a  large 
proportion  of  its  officers  were  under-educated  men,  narrow 
and  conventional,  inferior  in  imagination  and  initiative  to 
the  farmers,  lawyers,  cattle-drovers,  and  suchlike  leaders 
against  whom  their  wits  were  pitted.  Behind  the  rejoicings 
that  hailed  the  belated  peace  was  a  real  and  unprecedented 
national  humiliation.  For  the  first  time  the  educated  British 
were  enquiring  whether  all  was  well  with  the  national  system 
if  so  small  a  conquest  seemed  so  great  a  task.  Upon  minds 
thus  sensitized  came  the  realization  of  an  ever  more  vigor- 
ous and  ever  more  successful  industrial  and  trade  competi- 
tion from  Germany  and  the  United  States ;  Great  Britain 
was  losing  her  metallurgical  ascendancy,  dropping  far  be- 
hind in  the  chemical  industries  and  no  longer  supreme  upon 
the  seas.  For  the  first  time  a  threat  was  apparent  in  the 
methods  of  Germany.  Germany  was  launching  liner  after 
liner  to  challenge  the  British  mercantile  ascendancy,  and  she 
was  increasing  her  navy  with  a  passionate  vigour.  What 


216  JOAN  AND  PETER 

did  it  mean?  All  over  the  world  the  British  were  discover- 
ing the  German.  And  the  German,  it  seemed,  had  got  this 
New  Imperialism  that  was  in  the  British  mind  in  a  still 
harsher,  still  less  scrupulous  and  still  more  vulgar  form. 
"Wake  up,  England,"  said  the  Prince  of  Wales  returning 
from  a  visit  to  Canada,  and  Oswald  heard  the  phrase  rever- 
berating in  Uganda  and  talked  about  it  and  thought  it  over 
continually. 

(And  Lord  Rosebery  spoke  of  "efficiency.") 
But  now  when  Oswald  sought  in  the  newspapers  for  signs 
of  this  waking  up  that  he  desired,  he  found  instead  this 
tremendous  reiteration  of  the  ideas  of  the  New  Imperialism, 
acquisitive,  mercenary,  and  altogether  selfish  and  national, 
which  he  already  so  profoundly  disliked.  The  awakening 
he  desired  was  an  awakening  of  the  spirit,  an  awakening  to 
broader  ideas  and  nobler  conceptions  of  the  nation's  role  in 
the  world's  affairs.  He  had  hoped  to  find  men  talking  of 
great  schemes  of  national  education,  of  new  schools  of  ethnol- 
ogy, of  tropical  botany  and  oriental  languages  that  would 
put  the  Imperial  adventure  on  a  broad  basis  of  understand- 
ing and  competent  direction.  Instead,  he  found  England 
full  of  wild  talk  about  "taxing  the  foreigner."  A  hasty 
search  for  national  profit  he  refused  to  recognize  as  an 
awakening.  For  him  indeed  it  had  far  more  of  the  quality 
of  a  nightmare. 

•  §  3 

It  is  remarkable  how  much  our  deeper  convictions  are  at 
the  mercy  of  physiological  jolts. 

Before  the  renewed  attacks  of  fever  had  lowered  his  vital- 
ity, Oswald  had  felt  doubtful  of  this  and  that,  but  he  had 
never  doubted  of  the  ultimate  human  triumph ;  he  had  never 
even  doubted  that  the  great  Empire  he  served  would  survive, 
achieve  its  mission  triumphantly,  and  incorporate  itself 
in  some  way  with  a  unified  mankind.  lie  himself  might 
blunder  or  fail,  there  might  be  all  sorts  of  set-backs,  but  in 
the  end  what  he  called  Anglo-Saxonism  would  prevail,  the 
tradition  of  justice  and  free  speech  would  be  justified  by 
victory,  and  the  darkest  phase  of  the  Martyrdom  of  Man 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  217 

end.  But  now  the  fever  had  so  wrought  on  his  nerves  and 
tissues  that  he  no  longer  enjoyed  this  ultimate  confidence. 
He  could  think  that  anything  might  fail.  He  could  even 
doubt  the  stability  of  the  Victorian  world. 

One  night  during  this  last  illness  that  had  brought  him 
home  he  fell  thinking  of  Zimbabwe  and  the  lost  cities  of 
Africa,  and  then  presently  of  the  dead  cities  of  Yucatan, 
and  then  of  all  the  lost  and  vanished  civilizations  of  the 
world,  of  the  long  succession  of  human  failures  to  secure  any 
abiding  order  and  security.  With  this  he  mingled  the  sug- 
gestion of  a  recent  anthropological  essay  he  had  read.  Two 
races  of  men  with  big  brains  and  subtle  minds,  the  Neander- 
thal race  and  the  Cro-Magnon  race,  it  was  argued  very  con- 
vincingly, had  been  entirely  exterminated  before  the  begin- 
nings of  our  present  humanity.  Our  own  race  too  might 
fail  and  perish  and  pass  away.  In  the  night  with  a  mount- 
ing temperature  these  were  very  grisly  and  horrible  thoughts 
indeed.  And  when  at  last  he  passed  from  such  weary  and 
dismal  speculations  to  sleep,  there  came  a  dream  to  crown 
and  perpetuate  his  mood,  a  dream  that  was  to  return  again 
and  again. 

It  was  one  of  those  dreams  that  will  sometimes  give  a 
nightmare  reality  of  form  and  shape  to  the  merest  implica- 
tions of  the  waking  life,  one  of  those  dreams  that  run  before 
and  anticipate  and  perhaps  direct  one's  daylight  decisions. 
That  black  artist  of  delirium  who  throws  his  dark  creations 
upon  our  quivering  mental  screens,  had  seized  and  utilized 
all  Oswald's  germinating  misgivings  and  added  queer  sugges- 
tions of  his  own.  Through  a  thousand  irrelevant  and  transi- 
tory horrors  one  persistent  idea  ran  through  Oswald's  dis- 
tresses. It  was  the  idea  of  a  dark  forest.  And  of  an  end- 
less effort  to  escape  from  it.  He  was  one  of  the  captains 
of  a  vaguely  conceived  expedition  that  was  lost  in  an  in- 
terminable wilderness  of  shadows;  sometimes  it  was  an  ex- 
pedition of  limitless  millions,  and  the  black  trees  and  creep- 
ers about  him  went  up  as  high  as  the  sky,  and  sometimes  he 
alone  seemed  to  be  the  entire  expedition,  and  the  darkness 
rested  on  his  eyes,  and  the  thorns  wounded  him,  and  the 
great  ropes  of  the  creepers  slashed  his  face.  He  was  always 
struggling  to  get  through  this  forest  to  some  unknown  hope, 


218  JOAN  AND  PETER 

to  some  place  where  there  was  light,  where  there  was  air  and 
freedom,  where  one  could  look  with  brotherly  security  upon 
the  stars;  and  this  forest  which  was  Life,  held  him  back; 
it  held  him  with  its  darkness,  it  snared  him  with  slime  and 
marshy  pitfalls,  it  entangled  him  amidst  pools  and  channels 
of  black  and  blood-red  stinking  water,  it  tripped  him  and 
bound  him  with  its  creepers ;  evil  beasts  snared  his  followers, 
great  serpents  put  them  to  flight,  inexplicable  panics  and 
madnesses  threw  the  long  straggling  columns  into  internecine 
warfare,  incredible  imbecilities  threatened  the  welfare  of  the 
entire  expedition.  He  would  find  himself  examining  the 
loads  of  an  endless  string  of  porters,  and  this  man  had  flung 
away  bread  and  loaded  his  pack  with  poisonous  fungi,  and 
that  one  had  replaced  ammunition  by  rust  and  rubbish  and 
filth.  He  would  find  himself  in  frantic  remonstrance  with 
porters  who  had  flung  aside  their  loads,  who  were  sullenly 
preparing  to  desert;  or  again,  the  whole  multitude  would  be 
stricken  with  some  strange  disease  with  the  most  foul  and 
horrible  symptoms,  and  refuse  the  doubtful  medicines  he 
tendered  in  his  despair;  or  the  ground  would  suddenly  breed 
an  innumerable  multitude  of  white  thin  voracious  leeches 
that  turned  red-black  as  they  fed.  .  .  . 

Then  far  off  through  the  straight  bars  of  the  tree  stems 
a  light  shone,  and  a  great  hope  sprang  up  in  him.  And 
then  the  light  became  red,  a  wavering  red,  a  sudden  hot 
breeze  brought  a  sound  of  crackling  wood  and  the  soughing 
of  falling  trees,  spires  and  flags  and  agonized  phantoms  of 
flame  rushed  up  to  the  zenith;  through  the  undergrowth  a 
thousand  black  beasts  stampeded,  the  air  was  thick  with 
wild  flights  of  moths  and  humming-birds,  and  he  realized 
that  the  forest  had  caught  fire.  .  .  . 

That  forest  fire  was  always  a  climax.  "With  it  came  a 
burning  sensation  in  loins  and  back.  It  made  him  shout  and 
struggle  and  fight  amidst  the  black  fugitives  and  the  black 
thickets.  Until  the  twigs  and  leaves  about  him  were  bursting 
into  flames  like  a  Christmas  tree  that  is  being  lit  up.  He 
would  awaken  in  a  sweating  agony. 

Then  presently  he  would  be  back  again  in  the  midst  of 
that  vague  innumerable  expedition  in  the  steamy  deep  grey 
aisles  of  the  forest,  under  the  same  gathering  sense  of  urgent 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  219 

necessity,  amidst  the  same  inextricable  thickening  tangle  of 
confusions  and  cross-purposes. 

In  his  waking  moments  Oswald,  if  he  could,  would  have 
dismissed  that  dream  altogether  from  his  mind.  He  could 
argue  that  it  was  the  creation  of  some  purely  pathological 
despondency,  that  it  had  no  resemblance,  no  parallelism,  no 
sort  of  relation  to  reality.  Yet  something  of  its  dark  hues 
was  reflected  in  his  waking  thoughts.  Sometimes  this  reflec- 
tion was  so  faint  as  to  be  scarcely  perceptible,  but  always  it 
was  there. 

§  4 

The  Plantain,  to  which  Oswald  drifted  back  to  dine,  was 
a  club  gathered  from  the  ends  of  the  earth  and  very  proud 
of  the  fact ;  it  was  made  up  of  explorers,  travellers,  colonial 
officials,  K.C.M.G.'s  and  C.M.G.'s.  It  was  understood  to  be 
a  great  exchange  of  imperial  ideas,  and  except  for  a  group 
or  so  of  members  who  lived  in  and  about  London,  it  had 
no  conversation  because,  living  for  the  most  part  at  different 
ends  of  the  earth,  its  members  did  not  get  to  know  each 
other  very  well.  Occasionally  there  was  sporting  gossip. 
Shy,  sunburnt  men  drifted  in  at  intervals  of  three  or  four 
years,  and  dined  and  departed.  Once  a  member  with  a  sun- 
stroke from  India  gave  way  to  religious  mania,  and  tried  to 
preach  theosophy  from  the  great  staircase  to  three  lonely 
gentlemen  who  were  reading  the  telegrams  in  the  hall.  He 
was  removed  with  difficulty.  The  great  red-papered,  white- 
painted  silences  of  the  club  are  copiously  adorned  with  rather 
old  yellow  maps  of  remote  regions,  and  in  the  hall  big 
terrestrial  and  celestial  globes  are  available  for  any  mem- 
bers who  wish  to  refresh  their  minds  upon  the  broad  facts  of 
our  position  in  space.  But  the  great  glory  of  the  club  is  its 
wealth  of  ethnological  and  sporting  trophies.  Scarcely  is 
there  a  variety  of  spear,  stabbing  or  disembowelling  knife, 
blowing  tube,  bow,  crossbow,  or  matchlock,  that  is  not  at  the 
disposal  of  any  member  nimble  enough  to  pluck  it  from  the 
wall.  In  addition  there  is  a  vast  collection  of  the  heads  of 
beasts ;  everywhere  they  project  from  walls  and  pillars ;  heads 
of  bison,  gazelles  and  wart-hogs  cheer  the  souls  of  the  mem- 


220  JOAN  AND  PETER 

bers  even  in  the  humblest  recesses.  In  the  dining-room, 
above  each  table,  a  hippopotamus  or  a  rhinoceros  or  a  tiger 
or  a  lion  glares  out  with  glassy  eyes  upon  the  world,  showing 
every  item  in  its  dentition.  Below  these  monsters  sits  an  oc- 
casional empire-builder,  in  the  careful  evening  dress  of  the 
occasional  visitant  to  civilization,  seeming  by  contrast  a  very 
pallid,  little,  nicely  behaved  thing  indeed. 

To  the  Plantain  came  Oswald,  proposing  to  dine  alone, 
and  in  this  dining-room  he  discovered  Slingsby  Darton,  the 
fiscal  expert,  a  little  Cockney  with  scarcely  any  nose  at  all, 
sitting  with  the  utmost  impudence  under  the  largest  moose. 
Oswald  was  so  pleased  to  discover  any  one  he  knew  that  he 
only  remembered  that  he  detested  Slingsby  Darton  as  he 
prepared  to  sit  down  with  him.  There  was  nothing  for  it 
then  but  to  make  the  best  of  him. 

Oswald  chose  his  dinner  and  his  wine  with  care.  Red 
wines  were  forbidden  him,  but  the  wine  waiter  had  good 
authority,  authority  from  India  and  gastrically  very  sensi- 
tive, for  the  Moselle  he  recommended.  And  in  answer  to 
Slingsby  Darton 's  enquiries,  Oswald  spread  out  his  theory 
that  he  was  an  amiable,  pleased  sort  of  person  obliged  to 
come  home  from  Uganda,  sorry  to  leave  Uganda,  but  glad  to 
be  back  in  the  dear  old  country  and  "at  the  centre  of  things," 
and  ready  to  take  up  anything 

"Politics?"  said  Slingsby  Darton.  "We  want  a  few  voices 
that  have  got  out  of  sight  of  the  parish  pump." 

Politics — well,  it  might  be.  But  it  was  a  little  hard  to 
join  on  to  things  at  first.  "Fearful  lot  of  squabbling — not 
very  much  doing.  Not  nearly  as  much  as  one  had  hoped." 

That  seemed  a  restrained,  reasonable  sort  of  thing  to  say. 
Nor  was  it  extravagant  to  throw  out,  "I  thought  it  was 
'Wake  up,  England';  but  she  seems  just  to  be  talking  in  her 
sleep." 

Out  flares  the  New  Imperialism  at  once  in  Oswald's  face. 
"But  have  you  read  Chamberlain's  great  speeches?" 
Slingsby  Darton  protests. 

"I  had  those  in  mind,"  said  Oswald  grimly. 

Both  gentlemen  were  in  the  early  phase  of  encounter.  It 
was  not  yet  time  to  join  issue.  Slingsby  Darton  heard,  but 
made  no  retort.  Oswald  was  free  to  develop  his  discontents. 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  221 

Nothing  seemed  to  be  getting  done,  he  complained.  The 
army  had  been  proved  inefficient,  incapable  even,  of  a  colonial 
war,  but  what  were  we  doing? 

"Exactly,"  said  Slingsby  Darton.  "You  dare  not  even 
whisper  'conscription.'  ' 

Oswald  had  not  been  thinking  of  that  but  of  a  technical 
reorganization,  more  science,  more  equipment.  But  all  that 
he  could  see  in  the  way  of  a  change  were  "these  beastly  new 
caps."  (Those  were  the  days  of  the  hated  'Brodrick.') 
Then  economic  reorganization  hung  fire.  "Unemployed" 
processions  grew  bigger  every  winter.  ("  Tariff, ' '  whispered 
Darton.  "Intelligent,  organization, "  said  Oswald.)  Then 
education 

"Education,"  said  Oswald,  "is  at  the  heart  of  the  whole 
business." 

"I  wouldn't  say  that  altogether,"  said  Slingsby  Darton. 

"At  the  heart  of  the  whole  business,"  Oswald  repeated  as 
though  Sliugsby  Darton  had  not  spoken.  "The  people  do 
not  know.  Our  people  do  not  understand."  The  Boer  war 
had  shown  how  horribly  backward  our  education  was — our 
higher  education,  our  scientific  and  technical  education,  the 
education  of  our  officials  and  generals  in  particular.  "We 
have  an  empire  as  big  as  the  world  and  an  imagination  as 
small  as  a  parish."  But  it  would  be  a  troublesome  job  to 
change  that.  Much  too  troublesome.  Oswald  became  bitter 
and  accusatory.  His  living  side  sneered.  It  would  bother  a 
lot  of  Balfour's  friends  quite  uncomfortably.  The  dear  old 
Church  couldn't  keep  its  grip  on  an  education  of  that  sort, 
and  of  course  the  dear  old  Church  must  have  its  grip  on  edu- 
cation. So  after  a  few  large-minded  flourishes,  the  politi- 
cians had  swamped  the  whole  question  of  educational  reform 
in  this  row  about  church  schools  and  the  Passive  Resistance 
movement,  both  sides  only  too  glad  to  get  away  from  reality. 
Oswald  was  as  bitter  against  the  Passive  Resister  as  he  was 
against  the  Church. 

"I  don't  know  whether  I  should  give  quite  the  primary 
place  to  education,"  said  Slingsby  Darton,  battling  against 
this  tirade.  "I  don't  know  whether  I  should  quite  say  that. 
Mr.  Chamberlain " 

The  fat,  as  the  vulgar  say,  was  in  the  fire. 


222  JOAN  AND  PETER 

October,  1903,  was  a  feverish  and  impassioned  time  in 
English  affairs.  From  Birmingham  that  mouth  the  storm 
had  burst.  With  a  great  splash  Mr.  Joseph  Chamberlain 
had  flung  the  issue  of  Protection  into  the  sea  of  political 
affairs;  huge  waves  of  disturbance  were  sweeping  out  to  the 
uttermost  boundaries  of  the  empire.  Instead  of  paying 
taxes  we  were  to  "tax  the  foreigner."  To  that  our  fine  im- 
perial dream  had  come.  Over  dinner-tables,  in  trains  and 
smoking-rooms,  men  were  quarrelling  with  their  oldest 
friends.  To  Oswald  the  conversion  of  Imperialism  into  a 
scheme  for  world  exploitation  in  the  interests  of  Birming- 
ham seemed  the  most  atrocious  swamping  of  real  issues  by 
private  interests  that  it  was  possible  to  conceive.  The 
Sydenham  strain  was  an  uncommercial  strain.  Slingsby 
Darton  was  manifestly  in  the  full  swirl  of  the  new  movement, 
the  man  looked  cunning  and  eager,  he  put  his  pert  little 
face  on  one  side  and  raised  his  voice  to  argue.  A  gathering 
quarrelsomeness  took  possession  of  Oswald.  lie  began  to 
speak  very  rapidly  and  pungently.  He  assumed  an  exas- 
perating and  unjustifiable  detachment  in  order  to  quarrel 
better.  He  came  into  these  things  from  the  outside,  he  de- 
clared, quite  unbiased,  oh!  quite  unbiased.  And  this  "nail- 
trust  organizer's  campaign"  shocked  him — shocked  him  un- 
speakably. Here  was  England  confessedly  in  a  phase  of  in- 
efficiency and  deterioration,  needing  a  careful  all-round  ef- 
fort, in  education,  in  business  organization,  in  military  prepa- 
ration. And  suddenly  drowning  everything  else  in  his  noise 
came  "this  demagogue  ironmonger  with  his  panacea!" 

Slingsby  Darton  was  indignant.  "My  dear  Sir!  I  can- 
not hear  you  speak  of  Mr.  Chamberlain  in  such  terms  as 
that!" 

' '  But  consider  the  situation, ' '  said  Oswald.  ' '  Consider  the 
situation!  "When  of  all  things  we  want  steady  and  har- 
monious constructive  work,  comes  all  the  uproar,  all  the 
cheap,  mean  thinking  and  dishonest  spouting,  the  music-hall 
tricks  and  poster  arguments,  of  a  Campaign." 

Slingsby  Darton  argued.  "But,  my  dear  Sir,  it  is  a  con- 
structive campaign  !  It  is  based  on  urgent  economic  needs." 

Oswald  would  have  none  of  that.  Tariff  Reform  was  a 
quack  remedy.  "A  Zollverein.  Think  of  it!  With  an  em- 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  223 

pire  in  great  detached  patches  all  over  the  world.  Each 
patch  with  different  characteristics  and  different  needs.  A 
child  could  see  that  a  Zollvereiu  is  absurd.  A  child  could 
see  it.  Yet  to  read  the  speeches  of  Chamberlain  you'd  think 
a  tariff  could  work  geographical  miracles  and  turn  the  em- 
pire into  a  compact  continent,  locked  fast  against  the  for- 
eigner. How  can  a  scattered  host  become  a  band  of  rob- 
bers ?  The  mere  attempt  takes  us  straight  towards  disaster. ' ' 

''Straight  away  from  it!"  Slingsby  Barton  contradicted. 

Oswald  went  on  regardlessly.  "An  empire — scattered  like 
ours — run  on  selfish  and  exclusive  lines  must  bring  us  into 
conflict  with  every  other  people  under  the  sun,"  he  asserted. 
"It  must  do.  Apart  from  the  utter  and  wanton  unrighteous- 
ness, apart  from  the  treason  to  humanity.  Oh!  I  hate  this 
New  Imperialism.  I  hate  it  and  dread  it.  It  spoils  my  sleep 
at  nights,  it  worries  me  and  worries  me.  ..." 

Slingsby  Darton  thought  he  would  do  better  to  worry 
about  this  free  trade  of  ours  which  was  bleeding  us  to  death. 

"I  do  not  speak  as  one  ignorant  of  the  empire,"  said  Os- 
wald. "I  have  been  watching  it " 

Slingsby  Darton,  disregarded,  maintained  that  he,  too,  had 
been  watching. 

But  Oswald  was  now  at  the  "I  tell  you,  Sir,"  stage. 

He  declared  that  the  New  Imperialism  came  from  Ger- 
many. It  was  invented  by  professors  of  Weltpolitik.  Mil- 
ner  had  grafted  it  upon  us  at  Balliol.  But  German  condi- 
tions were  altogether  different  from  ours,  Germany  was  a 
geographical  unity,  all  drawn  together,  unified  by  natural 
necessity,  like  a  fist.  Germany  was  indeed  a  fist — by  geo- 
graphical necessity.  The  British  empire  was  like  an  open 
hand.  Must  be  like  an  open  hand.  We  were  an  open  peo- 
ple— or  we  were  nothing.  We  were  a  liberalizing  power  or 
we  were  the  most  pretentious  sham  in  history.  But  we 
seemed  to  be  forgetting  that  liberal  idea  for  which  we  stood. 
We  swaggered  now  like  owners,  forgetting  that  we  were 
only  trustees.  Trustees  for  mankind.  We  were  becoming  a 
boastful  and  a  sprawling  people.  The  idea  of  grabbing  half 
the  world — and  then  shutting  other  peoples  out  with  tariffs, 
was — Oswald  was  losing  self-control — "a  shoving  trades- 
man's dream."  And  we  were  doing  it — as  one  might  ex- 


224  JOAN  AND  PETER 

pect ' ' a  trust-organizing  nail-maker" — phrase  rubbed  in  with 
needless  emphasis — to  do  it.  We  were  shoving  about,  tread- 
ing on  everybody's  toes — and  failing  to  educate,  failing  to 
arm  Yes — shoving.  It  was  a  good  word.  He  did  not 
mind  how  many  times  he  used  it.  "This  dream  of  defying 
the  world  without  an  army,  and  dominating  it  without  edu- 
cation!" The  Germans  were  at  least  logical  in  their  sv:ag- 
ger.  If  they  shoved  about  they  also  armed.  And  they  edu- 
cated. Anyhow  they  trained.  But  we  trod  on  everybody's 
toes  and  tried  to  keep  friends  all  round.  .  .  . 

So  Oswald — under  the  moose — while  Slingsby  Darton  did 
what  he  could  by  stabbing  an  objection  at  him  now  and 
again.  It  became  clearer  and  clearer  to  Slingsby  Darton 
that  the  only  possibility  before  him  of  holding  his  own,  short 
of  throwing  knives  and  glasses  at  Oswald,  was  to  capture  the 
offensive. 

"You  complain  of  a  panacea,"  he  said,  poking  out  two 
arresting  fingers  at  Oswald.  ' '  That  Tariff  Reform  is  a  pana- 
cea. But  what  of  education?  What  of  this  education  of 
yours?  That  also  is  a  panacea. " 

And  just  then  apt  to  his  aid  came  Walsall  and  the  Bishop 
of  Pinner  from  their  table  under  the  big,  black,  clerical- 
looking  hippopotamus.  Walsall  was  a  naturalist,  and  had 
met  Oswald  in  the  days  of  his  biological  enthusiasm;  the 
Bishop  of  Pinner  had  formerly  been  the  Bishop  of  Tangan- 
yika and  knew  Oswald  by  repute.  So  they  came  over  to 
greet  him  and  were  at  once  seized  upon  as  auxiliaries  by 
Slingsby  Darton. 

"We're  getting  heated  over  politics,"  said  Slingsby  Dar- 
ton, indicating  that  at  least  Oswald  was. 

"Every  one  is  getting  heated  over  politics,"  said  the 
bishop.  "It's  as  bad  as  the  Home  Rule  split." 

"Sydenham's  panacea  is  to  save  the  world  by  education. 
He  won't  hear  of  economic  organization." 

The  bishop  opened  eyes  and  mouth  at  Oswald  until  he 
looked  like  the  full  moon.  .  .  . 

On  that  assertion  of  Sliugsby  Darton 's  they  drifted  past 
the  paying-desk  to  the  small  smoking-room,  and  there  they 
had  a  great  dispute  about  education  beneath  a  gallery  audi- 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  225 

ence,  so  to  speak,  composed  of  antelope,  Barbary  sheep,  gnu, 
yaks,  and  a  sea  lion.  Oswald  had  never  realized  before  how 
passionately  he  believed  in  education.  It  was  a  revelation. 
He  discovered  himself.  He  wanted  to  tell  these  men  they 
were  uneducated.  He  did  succeed  in  saying  that  Mr.  Cham- 
berlain was  "essentially  an  uneducated  man." 

Walsall  was  a  very  trying  opponent  for  a  disputant  of 
swift  and  passionate  convictions.  He  had  a  judicial  affec- 
tation, a  Socratic  pose.  He  was  a  grey,  fluffy-headed  man 
with  large  tortoiseshell  spectacles  and  a  general  resemblance 
to  a  kind  wise  owl.  He  liked  to  waggle  his  head  slowly  from 
side  to  side  and  smile.  He  liked  to  begin  sentences  with 
"But  have  you  thought ?"  or  "I  think  you  have  over- 
looked  "  or  "So  far  from  believing  that,  1  hold  the  exact 

converse."  He  said  these  things  in  a  very  suave  voice  as 
though  each  remark  was  carefully  dressed  in  oil  before  serv- 
ing. 

He  expressed  grave  doubts  whether  there  was  "any  benefit 
in  education — any  benefit  whatever." 

But  the  argument  that  formed  that  evening's  entertain- 
ment for  the  sea  lion  and  those  assorted  ruminating  artio- 
dactyls  was  too  prolonged  and  heated  and  discursive  to  in- 
terest any  but  the  most  sedulous  reader.  Every  possible 
sort  of  heresy  about  education  seemed  loose  that  night  for 
the  affliction  of  Oswald.  Slingsby  Darton  said,  "Make  men 
prosperous  and  education  will  come  of  its  own  accord." 
Walsall  thought  that  the  sort  of  people  who  benefited  by 
education  "would  get  on  anyhow."  He  thought  knowledge 
was  of  value  according  to  the  difficulty  one  experienced  in 
attaining  it.  (Could  any  sane  man  really  believe  that?) 
"I  would  persecute  science,"  said  Walsall,  "and  then  it 
would  be  taken  care  of  by  enthusiasts." 

"But  do  you  know,"  said  Oswald,  with  an  immense  quiet 
in  his  manner,  "that  there  is  a — a  British  Empire?  An  em- 
pire with  rather  urgent  needs?" 

(Suppressed  murmur  from  Slingsby  Darton:  "Then  I 
don't  see  what  your  position  is  at  all !") 

"Walsall  disputed  these  "needs."  Weren't  we  all  too  much 
disposed  to  make  the  empire  a  thing  of  plan  and  will  ?  An 


226  JOAN  AND  PETER 

empire  was  a  growth.  It  was  like  a  man,  it  grew  without 
taking  thought.  Presently  it  aged  and  decayed.  We  were 
not  going  to  save  the  empire  by  taking  thought. 

(Slingsby  Darton,  disregarded,  now  disagreeing  with  Wal- 
sall.) 

"Germany  takes  thought,"  Oswald  interjected. 

"To  its  own  undoing,  perhaps,"  said  Walsall.  .  .  . 

The  bishop's  method  of  annoyance  was  even  blander  than 
Walsall 's,  and  more  exasperating  to  the  fevered  victim.  He 
talked  of  the  evils  of  an  "educated  proletariat."  For  a 
stable  community  only  a  certain  proportion  of  educated  peo- 
ple was  advisable.  You  could  upset  the  social  balance  by 
over-educating  the  masses.  "We  destroy  good,  honest,  sim- 
ple-souled  workers  in  order  to  make  discontented  clerks." 
Oswald  spluttered,  "You  must  make  a  citizen  in  a  modern 
population  understand  something  of  the  State  he  belongs  to ! " 

"Better,  Faith,"  said  the  bishop.  "Far  better,  Faith. 
Teach  them  a  simple  Catechism." 

He  had  visited  Russia.  He  had  been  to  the  coronation  of 
the  Tzar,  a  beautiful  ceremony,  only  a  little  marred  by  a  quite 
accidental  massacre  of  some  of  the  spectators.  Those  were 
the  days  before  the  Russo-Japanese  war  and  the  coming  of 
the  Duma.  There  was  much  to  admire  in  Russia,  the  good 
bishop  declared;  much  to  learn.  Russia  was  the  land  of 
Mary,  great-souled  and  blessed;  ours  alas!  was  the  land  of 
bustling  Martha.  Nothing  more  enviable  than  the  political 
solidarity  of  Russia — "after  our  warring  voices.  .  .  .  Time 
after  time  I  asked  myself,  'Aren't  we  Westerns  on  the  wrong 
track?  Here  is  something— Great.  And  growing  greater. 
Something  simple.  Here  is  obedience  and  a  sort  of  primitive 
contentment.  Trust  in  the  Little  White  Father,  belief  in 
God.  Here  Christianity  lives  indeed.'  " 

About  eleven  o'clock  Walsall  was  propounding  a  paradox. 
"All  this  talk  of  education,"  he  said,  "reminds  me  of  the 
man  who  tried  to  lift  himself  by  his  own  ears.  How,  I  ask 
myself,  can  a  democracy  such  as  ours  take  an  intelligent  in- 
terest in  its  destiny  unless  it  is  educated,  and  how  can  it 
educate  itself  unless  it  takes  an  intelligent  interest  in  its 
destiny  ?  How  escape  that  dilemma ? ' ' 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  227 

"A  community,"  said  Oswald,  grappling  with  this  after 
a  moment,  "a  community  isn't  one  mind,  it's  a  number  of 
minds,  some  more  intelligent,  some  less.  It's  a  perpetual 
flow  of  new  minds " 

Then  something  gave  way  within  him. 

"We  sit  here,"  he  said  in  a  voice  so  full  of  fury  that  the 
mouth  of  the  bishop  fell  open,  "and  while  we  talk  this  half- 
witted, half-clever  muck  to  excuse  ourselves  from  getting  the 
nation  into  order,  the  sands  run  out  of  the  glass.  The  time 
draws  near  when  the  empire  will  be  challenged " 

He  stood  up  abruptly. 

"Have  you  any  idea,"  he  said,  "what  the  empire  might 
be?  Have  you  thought  of  these  hundreds  of  millions  to 
whom  we  might  give  light — had  we  light?  Are  we  to  be  a 
possessing  and  profit-hunting  people  because  we  have  not  the 
education  to  be  a  leaderly  people?  Are  we  to  do  no  better 
than  Rome  and  Carthage — and  loot  the  provinces  of  the 
world?  Loot  or  education,  that  is  the  choice  of  every  im- 
perial opportunity.  All  England,  I  find,  is  echoing  with 
screams  for  loot.  Have  none  of  us  vision ?  None?" 

The  bishop  shook  his  head  sadly.  The  man,  he  thought, 
was  raving. 

"What  i-s  this  vision  of  yours?"  sneered  Walsall.  "Ten 
thousand  professors?" 

"After  all,"  said  Slingsby  Darton  with  a  weary  insidious- 
ness,  "we  do  not  differ  about  our  fundamental  idea.  You 
must  have  funds.  You  must  endow  your  schools.  Without 
Tariff  Reform  to  give  you  revenue " 

But  Oswald  was  not  going  to  begin  over  again. 

"I  ought  to  be  in  bed,"  he  said,  looking  at  his  watch. 
"My  doctor  sends  me  to  bed  at  ten.  ..." 

"My  God!"  he  whispered  as  he  put  on  his  coat  under  the 
benevolent  supervision  of  an  exceptionally  fine  Indian  buffalo. 

"What  is  to  happen  to  the  empire,"  he  cried,  going  out 
into  the  night  and  addressing  himself  to  the  moon,  to  the 
monument  which  commemorates  the  heroic  incompetence  of 
the  Duke  of  York,  and  to  an  interested  hansom  cabby,  "what 
is  to  happen  to  the  empire — when  these  are  its  educated 
opinions?" 


228  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  5 

But  it  is  high  time  that  Joan  and  Peter  came  back  into 
this  narrative.  For  this  is  their  story,  it  bears  their  names 
on  its  covers  and  on  its  back  and  on  its  title-page  and  at 
the  head  of  each  left-hand  page.  It  has  been  necessary  to 
show  the  state  of  mind,  the  mental  condition,  the  outlook,  of 
their  sole  guardian  when  their  affairs  came  into  his  hands. 
This  done  they  now  return  by  telephone.  Oswald  had  not 
been  back  in  the  comfortable  sitting-room  at  the  Climax  Club 
for  ten  minutes  before  he  was  rung  up  by  Mr.  Sycamore  and 
reminded  of  his  duty  to  his  young  charges.  A  club  page 
called  Mr.  Sydenham  to  the  receiver  in  his  bedroom. 

In  those  days  the  telephone  was  still  far  from  perfection. 
It  had  not  been  in  general  use  for  a  decade.  .  .  .  Mr.  Syca- 
more was  audible  as  a  still  small  voice. 

"Mr.  Sydenham?     Sycamore  speaking." 

"No  need  to  be,"  said  Oswald.  "You  haven't  been  speak- 
ing to  me." 

"Who  am  I  speaking  to?  I  want  Mr.  Sydenham.  Syca- 
more speaking." 

"  I  'm  Mr.  Sydenham.  Who  are  you  ?  No  need  to  be  sick 
of  your  speaking  so  far  as  I'm  concerned.  I've  only  just 
been  called  to  the  telephone ' 

"Your  solicitor,  Sycamore.     S.Y.C.A.M.O.R.E." 

"Oh!  Right  O.  How  are  you,  Mr.  Sycamore?  I'm  Sy- 
denham. How  are  those  children?" 

"Hope  you're  well,  Mr.  Sydenham?" 

"Gaudy — in  a  way.     How  are  you?" 

"I've  been  with  Lady  Charlotte  today.  I  don't  know  if 
you've  heard  anything  of " 

Whop !     Whop.     Bunnik.     Silence. 

After  a  little  difficulty  communication  with  Mr.  Sycamore 
was  partially  restored.  I  say  partially  because  his  voice 
had  now  become  very  small  and  remote  indeed.  "I  was 
saying,  I  don't  know  if  you  understand  anything  of  the 
present  state  of  affairs." 

' '  Xothing, ' '  said  Oswald.     ' '  Fire  ahead. ' ' 

"Can  you  hear  me  distinctly?  I  find  you  almost  in- 
audible." 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  229 

Remonstrances  with  the  exchange  led  after  a  time  to 
slightly  improved  communications. 

' '  You  were  saying  something  about  a  fire  ? ' '  said  Mr.  Syca- 
more. 

' '  I  said  nothing  about  a  fire.  You  were  saying  something 
about  the  children?" 

"Well,  well.  Things  are  in  a  very  confused  state,  Mr. 
Sydenham.  I  hope  you  mean  to  take  hold  of  their  educa- 
tion. These  children  are  not  being  educated,  they  are  being 
fought  over." 

' '  Who 's  thinking  over  them  ? ' ' 

"No  one.  But  the  Misses  Stubland  and  Lady  Charlotte 
are  fighting  over  them.  .  .  .  F.LG.H.T.LN.G.  I  want  you 
to  think  over  them.  .  .  .  You — yes.  .  .  .  Think,  yes.  Both 
clever  children.  Great  waste  if  they  are  not  properly  edu- 
cated. .  .  .  Matters  are  really  urgent.  I  have  been  with 
Lady  Charlotte  today.  You  know  she  kidnapped  them?" 

"Kidnapped?" 

A  bright  girlish  voice,  an  essentially  happy  voice,  cut  into 
the  conversation  at  this  point.  "Three  minutes  up,"  it  said. 

Empire-building  language  fell  from  Oswald.  In  some  ob- 
scure way  this  feminine  intervention  was  swept  aside,  and 
talk  was  resumed  with  Mr.  Sycamore. 

It  continued  to  be  a  fragmentary  talk,  and  for  a  time  the 
burthen  of  some  unknown  lady  complaining  to  an  unknown 
friend  about  the  behaviour  of  a  third  unknown  named  George, 
stated  to  lack  "gumption,"  interwove  with  the  main  theme. 
But  Mr.  Sycamore  did  succeed  in  conveying  to  Oswald  a 
sense  of  urgency  about  the  welfare  of  his  two  charges.  Im- 
mediate attention  was  demanded.  They  were  being  neg- 
lected. The  girl  was  ill.  "I  would  like  to  talk  it  over  with 
you  as  soon  as  possible, ' '  said  Mr.  Sycamore. 

"Can  you  come  and  breakfast  here  at  eight?"  said  the 
man  from  the  tropics. 

"Half  past  nine,"  said  the  Londoner,  and  the  talk  closed. 

The  talk  ended,  but  for  a  time  the  bell  of  Oswald's  tele- 
phone remained  in  an  agitated  state,  giving  little  nervous 
rings  at  intervals.  When  he  answered  these  the  exchange 
said  "Number  please,"  and  when  he  said,  "You  rang  me," 
the  exchange  said,  "Oh,  no!  we  didn't.  ..." 


230  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"An  empire,"  wnispered  Oswald,  sitting  on  the  edge  of 
his  bed,  "which  cannot  even  run  a  telephone  service  effi- 
ciently. ..." 

''Education.  ..." 

He  tried  to  recall  his  last  speech  at  the  club.  Had  he 
ranted?  What  had  they  thought  of  it?  "What  precisely 
had  he  said?  While  they  sat  and  talked  muck — his  memory 
was  unpleasantly  insistent  upon  that  "muck" — the  sands 
ran  out  of  the  hour-glass,  a  new  generation  grew  up. 

Had  he  said  that  ?  That  was  the  point  of  it  all — about  the 
new  generation.  A  new  generation  was  growing  up  and  we 
were  doing  nothing  to  make  it  wiser,  more  efficient,  to  give 
it  a  broader  outlook  than  the  generation  that  had  blundered 
into  and  blundered  through  the  Boer  war.  Had  he  said 
that  ?  That  was  what  he  ought  to  have  said. 

§  6 

For  a  long  time  he  sat  on  his  bed,  blank-minded  and  too 
tired  to  finish  undressing.  He  got  to  bed  at  last.  But  not 
to  sleep.  He  found  that  the  talk  in  the  club  had  disturbed 
his  mind  almost  unendurably.  It  had  pointed  and  endorsed 
everything  that  he  had  been  trying  not  to  think  about  the 
old  country.  Now,  too  weary  and  too  excited  to  sleep,  he 
turned  over  and  over  again,  unprofitably  and  unprogres- 
sively,  the  tangled  impressions  of  his  return  to  England. 

How  many  millions  of  such  hours  of  restless  questioning 
must  have  been  spent  by  wakeful  Englishmen  in  the  dozen 
years  between  the  Boer  war  and  the  Great  war;  how  many 
nocturnally  scheming  brains  must  have  explored  the  compli- 
cated maze  of  national  dangers,  national  ambitions,  and  na- 
tional ineptitude!  If  "Wake  up,  England,"  sowed  no  great 
harvest  of  change  in  the  daylight,  it  did  at  any  rate  produce 
large  phantom  crops  at  night.  He  argued  with  Walsall  over 
and  over  again,  sometimes  wide  awake  and  close  to  the  point, 
sometimes  drowsily  with  the  discussion  becoming  vague  and 
strangely  misshapen  and  incoherent.  Was  Walsall  right? 
Was  it  impossible  to  change  the  nature  and  quality  of  a 
people?  Must  we  English  always  be  laggards  in  peace  and 
blunderers  in  war?  Were  our  achievements  accidents,  and 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  231 

our  failures  essential  ?  Was  slackness  in  our  blood  ?  Surely 
a  great  effort  might  accomplish  much,  a  great  effort  to  reor- 
ganize political  life,  to  improve  national  education,  to  make 
the  press  a  better  instrument  of  public  thought  and  criticism. 
To  which  Walsall  answered  again  with,  "How  can  a  demo- 
cratic community  take  an  intelligent  interest  in  its  destinies 
unless  it  is  educated,  and  how  can  it  educate  itself  unless  it 
takes  an  intelligent  interest  in  its  destinies?" 

Oswald  groaned  and  turned  over  in  bed. 

Thought  passed  by  insensible  degrees  into  dreaming  and 
dreaming  shallowed  again  to  wakefulness.  Always  he  seemed 
to  be  arguing  with  Walsall  and  the  bishop  for  education  and 
effort;  nevertheless,  now  vaguely  apprehended  as  an  atmos- 
pheric background,  now  real  and  close,  the  black  forest  of  his 
African  nightmare  was  about  him.  Always  he  was  strug- 
gling on  and  always  he  was  hoping  to  see  down  some  vista  the 
warm  gleam  of  daylight,  the  promise  of  the  open.  And  Wal- 
sall, a  vast  forest  owl  with  enormous  spectacles,  kept  getting 
in  the  way,  flapping  hands  that  were  really  great  wings  at 
him  and  assuring  him  that  there  was  no  way  out.  None. 
''This  forest  is  life.  This  forest  will  always  be  life.  There 
is  no  other  life.  After  all  it  isn't  such  a  very  bad  forest." 
Other  figures,  too,  came  and  went;  a  gigantic  bishop  sitting 
back  in  an  easy  chair  blocked  one  hopeful  vista,  declaring 
that  book-learning  only  made  the  lower  classes  discontented 
and  mischievous,  and  then  a  stupidly  contented  fat  man 
smoking  a  fat  cigar  drove  in  a  gig  athwart  the  line  of  march. 
He  said  nothing;  he  just  drove  his  gig.  Then  somehow  an 
automobile  came  in,  a  most  hopeful  means  of  escape,  except 
that  it  had  broken  down ;  and  Oswald  was  trying  to  repair  it 
in  spite  of  the  jeering  of  an  elderly  gentleman  in  a  white 
waistcoat.  Suddenly  the  whole  forest  swarmed  with  chil- 
dren. There  were  countless  children;  there  were  just  two 
children.  Instead  of  a  multitudinous  expedition  Oswald 
found  himself  alone  in  the  black  jungle  with  just  two  chil- 
dren, two  white  and  stunted  children  who  were  dying  for  the 
air  and  light.  No  one  had  cared  for  them.  One  was  ill,  seri- 
ously ill.  Unless  the  way  out  was  found  they  could  not  live. 
They  were  Dolly's  children,  his  wards.  But  what  was  he  to 
do  for  them  ?  . 


232  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Then  far  ahead  he  saw  that  light  of  the  great  conflagra- 
tion, that  light  that  promised  to  be  daylight  and  became  a 
fire.  .  .  . 

"Black  coffee,"  said  Oswald  during  one  of  the  wide-awake 
intervals.  "Cigars.  Talk.  Over-excited.  ...  I  ought  to 
be  more  careful.  ...  I  forget  how  flims}r  I  am  still.  .  .  . 

"I  must  get  my  mind  off  these  things.  I'll  talk  to  old 
Sycamore  tomorrow  and  see  about  this  little  master  Peter 
Stubland  and  his  foster-sister.  I'll  go  into  the  matter  thor- 
oughly. I  haven't  thought  of  them  before. 

"I  wonder  if  the  boy  still  takes  after  Dolly.  .  .  . 

"After  all,"  he  said,  rolling  over,  "it's  true.  Education 
is  the  big  neglected  duty  of  the  time.  It's  fundamental. 
And  what  am  I  doing?  It's  just  England — England  all 
over —  to  let  that  boy  be  dragged  up.  I  ought  to  see  about 
him — now.  I'll  go  down  there.  .  .  . 

"I'll  go  and  stay  with  Aunt  Charlotte  for  a  day  or  so. 
I'll  send  her  a  wire  tomorrow. 

§  7 

The  quiet  but  observant  life  of  old  Cashel  at  Chastlands 
was  greatly  enlivened  by  the  advent  of  Oswald. 

Signs  of  a  grave  and  increasing  agitation  in  the  mind  of 
Cashel 's  mistress  became  evident  immediately  after  the  de- 
parture of  Mr.  Sycamore.  Manifestly  whatever  that  gentle- 
man had  said  or  done — old  Cashel  had  been  able  to  catch  very 
little — had  been  of  a  highly  stimulating  nature.  So  soon  as 
he  was  out  of  the  house,  Lady  Charlotte  abandoned  her  sofa 
and  table,  upsetting  her  tonic  as  she  did  so,  and  still  wearing 
her  dressing-gown  and  cap,  proceeded  to  direct  a  hasty  pack- 
ing for  Italy.  Unwin  became  much  agitated,  and  a  house- 
maid being  addressed  as  a  "perfect  fool"  became  a  sniffing 
fount  of  tears.  There  was  a  running  to  and  fro  with  trunks 
and  tea-baskets,  a  ringing  of  bells,  and  minor  orders  were 
issued  and  countermanded ;  the  carriage  was  summoned  twice 
for  an  afternoon  drive  and  twice  dismissed.  When  at  last 
the  lace  peignoir  was  changed  for  a  more  suitable  costume  in 
which  to  take  tea,  Lady  Charlotte  came  so  near  to  actual 
physical  violence  that  Unwin  abruptly  abandoned  her  quest 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  233 

of  a  perfect  pose  for  wig  and  cap,  and  her  ladyship  surprised 
and  delighted  Cashel  with  a  blond  curl  cocked  waggishly 
over  one  eye.  She  did  not  have  tea  until  half -past  five. 

She  talked  to  herself  with  her  hard  blue  eyes  iixed  on 
vacancy.  "I  will  not  stay  here  to  be  insulted,"  she  said. 

4 '  Rampageous, ' '  whispered  Cashel  on  the  landing.  ' '  Rum- 
bustious. What 's  it  all  about?" 

''Cashel!"  she  said  sharply  as  he  was  taking  away  the  tea- 
things. 

"M'lady." 

"Telephone  to  Mr.  Grimes  and  ask  him  to  take  tickets  as 
usual  for  myself  and  Unwin  to  Pallanza — for  tomorrow." 

It  was  terrible  but  pleasing  to  have  to  tell  her  that  Mr. 
Grimes  would  now  certainly  have  gone  home  from  his  office. 

"See  that  it  is  done  tomorrow.  Tomorrow  I  must  catch 
the  eleven  forty-seven  for  Charing  Cross.  I  shall  take  lunch 
with  me  in  the  train.  A  wing  of  chicken.  A  drop  of  claret. 
Perhaps  a  sandwich.  Gentleman's  Relish  or  shrimp  paste. 
And  a  grape  or  so.  A  mere  mouthful.  I  shall  expect  you  to 
be  in  attendance  to  help  with  the  luggage  as  far  as  Charing 
Cross.  ..." 

So  she  was  going  after  all. 

"Like  a  flight,"  mused  Cashel.  "What's  after  the  Old 
Girl?"  .  .  . 

lie  grasped  the  situation  a  little  more  firmly  next  day. 

The  preparations  for  assembling  Lady  Charlotte  in  the 
hall  before  departure  were  well  forward  at  eleven  o'clock, 
although  there  was  no  need  to  start  for  the  station  until  the 
half  hour.  A  brief  telegram  from  Oswald  received  about 
half-past  ten  had  greatly  stimulated  these  activities.  .  .  . 

t'nwin,  very  white  in  the  face — she  always  had  a  bilious 
headache  when  travelling  was  forward — and  dressed  in  the 
peculiar  speckled  black  dress  and  black  hat  that  she  consid- 
ered most  deterrent  to  foreign  depravity,  was  already  sitting 
stiffly  in  the  hall  with  Lady  Charlotte's  purple-coloured 
dressing-bag  beside  her,  and  Cashel  having  seen  to  the  roll  of 
rugs  was  now  just  glancing  through  the  tea-basket  to  make 
sure  that  it  was  in  order,  when  suddenly  there  was  the  flap- 
ping, rustling  sound  of  a  large  woman  in  rapid  movement 
upon  the  landing  above,  and  Lady  Charlotte  appeared  at  the 


234  JOAN  AND  PETER 

head  of  the  stairs,  all  hatted,  veiled  and  wrapped  for  travel- 
ling. Her  face  was  bright  white  with  excitement.  "Unwin, 
I  want  you,"  she  cried.  "Cashel,  say  I'm  in  bed.  Say  I'm 
ill  and  must  not  be  disturbed.  Say  I've  been  taken  ill." 

She  vanished  with  the  agility  of  a  girl  of  twenty — except 
that  the  landing  was  of  a  different  opinion. 

The  two  servants  heard  her  scuttle  into  her  room  and  slam 
the  door.  There  was  a  great  moment  of  silence. 

"Oh,  Lor'!"  Unwin  rose  with  the  sigh  of  a  martyr,  and 
taking  the  dressing-bag  with  her — the  fittings  alone  were 
worth  forty  pounds — and  pressing  her  handkerchief  to  her 
aching  brow,  marched  upstairs. 

Cashel,  agape,  was  roused  by  the  ringing  of  the  front  door 
bell.  He  opened  to  discover  Mr.  Oswald  Sydenham  with  one 
arm  in  a  sling  and  a  rug  upon  the  other. 

' '  Hullo,  Cashel, ' '  he  said.  ' '  I  suppose  my  room  isn 't  occu- 
pied? My  telegram  here?  How's  Lady  Charlotte?" 

"Very  poorly,  sir,"  said  Cashel.  "She's  had  to  take  in 
her  bed,  sir." 

"Pity.     Anything  serious?" 

"A  sudden  attact,  sir." 

"H'm.  Well,  tell  her  I'm  going  to  inflict  myself  upon 
her  for  a  day  or  so.  Just  take  my  traps  in  and  I'll  go  on 
with  this  fly  to  Limpsfield.  Say  I'll  be  back  to  dinner." 

"Certainly,  sir." 

The  old  man  bustled  out  to  get  in  the  valise  and  Gladstone 
bag  that  constituted  Oswald's  luggage.  When  he  came  into 
the  hall  again  he  found  the  visitor  scrutinizing  the  tea- 
basket  and  the  roll  of  rugs  with  his  one  penetrating  eye  in 
a  manner  that  made  him  dread  a  question.  But  Oswald 
never  questioned  servants;  on  this  occasion  only  he  winked 
at  one. 

"Nothing  wrong  with  the  arm,  sir?"  asked  old  Cashel. 

"Nothing,"  said  Oswald,  still  looking  markedly  at  the 
symptoms  of  imminent  travel.  "H'm." 

He  went  out  to  the  fly,  stood  ready  to  enter  it,  and  then 
swivelled  round  very  quickly  and  looked  up  at  his  aunt's 
bedroom  window  in  time  to  catch  an  instant  impression  of 
a  large,  anxious  face  regarding  him. 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  235 

"Ah!"  said  Oswald,  and  returned  smiling  grimly  into  the 
hall. 

"Cashel,"  he  called. 

''Sir?" 

"Her  ladyship  is  up.  Tell  her  I  have  a  few  words  to  say 
to  her  before  she  goes. ' ' 

"Beg  pardon,  sir " 

"Look  here,  Cashel,  you  do  what  I  tell  you." 

"I'll  tell  Miss  Unwin,  sir." 

He  went  upstairs,  leaving  Oswald  still  thinking  over  the 
rugs.  Yes,  she  was  off!  She  had  got  everything;  pointed 
Alpine  sticks,  tea-basket,  travelling  campstool.  It  must  be 
Switzerland  or  Italy  for  the  winter  at  least.  A  great  yearn- 
ing to  see  his  aunt  with  his  own  eye  came  upon  Oswald.  He 
followed  Cashel  upstairs  quietly  but  swiftly,  and  found  him 
in  a  hasty  whispered  consultation  with  Unwin  on  the  second 
landing.  "Oh  my  'ed'll  burst  bang,"  Unwin  was  saying. 

"  'Er  ladyship,  sir,"  she  began  at  the  sight  of  Oswald. 

"Ssh !"  he  said  to  her,  and  held  her  and  Cashel  silent  with 
an  uplifted  forefinger  while  he  listened  to  the  sounds  of  a 
large  powerful  woman  going  to  bed  swiftly  and  violently  in 
her  clothes. 

"I  must  go  in  to  her,  sir,"  said  Unwin  breaking  the  silence. 
"Poor  dear!  It's  a  very  sudden  attact." 

The  door  opened  and  closed  upon  Unwin. 

"Lock  the  door  on  him,  you — you  Idiot!"  they  heard  Lady 
Charlotte  shout — too  late. 

The  hated  and  dreaded  visage  of  Oswald  appeared  looking 
round  the  corner  of  the  door  into  the  great  lady's  bedroom. 
Her  hat  had  been  flung  aside,  she  was  tying  on  an  unconvinc- 
ing night  cap  over  her  great  blond  travelling  wig;  her 
hastily  assumed  nightgown  betrayed  the  agate  brooch  at  her 
neck. 

"How  dare  you,  sir!"  she  cried  at  the  sight  of  him. 

"You're  not  ill.  You're  going  to  cut  off  to  Italy  this 
afternoon.  What  have  you  done  to  my  Wards?" 

"A  lady's  sick  room!  Sacred,  Sir!  Have  you  no  sense 
of  decency?" 

"Is  it  measles,  Auntie?" 


236  JOAN  AND  PETER 

11  Go  away!" 

1 '  I  daren  't.  If  I  leave  you  alone  in  this  country  for  a  year 
or  two  you're  bound  to  get  into  trouble.  What  ani  I  to  do 
with  you?" 

"Unbecoming  intrusion!" 

"You  ought  to  be  stopped  by  the  Foreign  Office.  You'll 
lead  to  a  war  with  Italy." 

"Go  for  a  doctor,  Cashel,"  she  cried  aloud  in  her  great 
voice.  "Go  for  the  doctor." 

"M'lady,"  very  faintly  from  the  landing. 

"And  countermand  the  station  cab,  Cashel,"  said  Oswald. 

"If  you  do  anything  of  the  sort,  Cashel!"  she  cried,  and 
sitting  up  in  bed  clutched  the  sheets  with  such  violence  that 
a  large  spring-sided  boot  became  visible  at  the  foot  of  the 
bed.  The  great  lady  had  gone  to  bed  in  her  boots.  Aunt 
and  nephew  both  glared  at  this  revelation  in  an  astonished 
silence. 

"How  can  you,  Auntie,"  said  Oswald. 

"If  I  choose,"  said  Lady  Charlotte.  "If  I  choose 

Oh!  Go  away!" 

"Back  to  dinner,"  said  Oswald  sweetly,  and  withdrew. 

He  was  still  pensive  upon  the  landing  when  Unwin  ap- 
peared to  make  sure  that  the  station  cab  was  not  counter- 
manded. .  .  . 

Under  the  circumstances  he  was  not  surprised  to  find  on 
his  return  from  The  Ingle-Nook  that  he  was  now  the  only 
occupant  of  Chastlands.  Aunt  Charlotte  had  fled,  leaving 
behind  a  note  that  had  evidently  been  written  before  his 
arrival. 

My  dear  Nephew, — I  am  sorry  that  my  arrangements  for 
going  abroad  this  winter,  already  made,  prevent  my  welcom- 
ing you  home  for  this  uninvited  and  totally  unexpected  visit. 
I  am  sure  Cashel  and  the  other  servants  will  take  good  care 
of  you.  You  seem  to  know  the  may  to  their  good  graces. 
There  are  many  things  I  should  have  liked  to  talk  over  with 
you  if  you  had  given  me  due  and  proper  notice  of  your  return 
as  you  ought  to  have  clone,  instead  of  leaving  it  to  a  solicitor 
to  break  the  glad  tidings  to  me,  followed  by  a  sixpenny  tele- 
gram. As  it  is,  I  shall  just  miss  you.  I  have  to  go,  and  I 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  237 

cannot  wait.  All  my  arrangements  are  made.  I  suppose  it 
is  idle  to  expect  civility  from  you,  ever  or  the  slightest  atten- 
tion to  the  convenances.  The  tiydenhams  have  never  shone 
in  manners.  Well,  1  hope  you  will  take  those  two  poor  chil- 
dren quite  out  of  the  hands  of  those  smoking,  blaspheming, 
nightgown-wearing  Limps/ield  women.  They  are  utterly  un- 
fit for  such  a  responsibility.  Utterly.  I  would  not  trust  a 
pauper  brat  in  their  hands.  The  children  require  firm  treat- 
ment, the  girl  especially,  or  they  will  be  utterly  spoilt.  She 
is  deceitful  and  dishonest,  as  one  might  expect;  she  gave 
Mrs.  Pybus  a  very  trying  time  indeed,  catching  measles  de- 
liberately and  so  converting  the  poor  woman's  house  into  a 
regular  hospital.  I  fear  for  her  later.  I  have  done  my  best 
for  them  both.  No  doubt  you  will  find  it  all  spun  into  a 
fine  tale,  but  I  trust  your  penetration  to  see  through  a  tissue 
of  lies,  however  plausible  it  may  seem  at  the  first  blush.  I 
am  glad  to  think  you  are  now  to  relieve  me  of  a  serious  re- 
sponsibility, though  how  a  single  man  not  related  to  her  in 
the  slightest  degree  can  possibly  bring  up  a  young  girl,  even 
though  illegitimate,  without  grave  scandal,  passes  my  poor 
comprehension.  No  doubt  I  am  an  old-fashioned  old  fool 
nowadays!  Thank  God!  I  beg  to  be  excused! 
Tour  affectionate  Aunt 

CHARLOTTE. 

Towards  the  end  of  this  note  her  ladyship's  highly  angular 
handwriting  betrayed  by  an  enhanced  size  and  considerable 
irregularity,  a  deflection  from  her  customary  calm. 

§  8 

Oswald  knocked  for  some  time  at  the  open  green  door  of 
The  Ingle-Nook  before  attracting  any  one's  attention.  Then 
a  small  but  apparently  only  servant  appeared,  a  little  round- 
faced  creature  who  looked  up  hard  into  Oswald's  living  eye 
— as  though  she  didn't  quite  like  the  other  She  explained 
that  "Miss  Phyllis"  was  not  at  home,  and  that  "Miss  Phrebe 
mustn't  be  disturved."  Miss  Phoebe  was  working.  Miss 
Phyllis  had  gone  away  with  Mary 

' '  Who 's  Mary  ? ' '  said  Oswald. 


238  JOAN  AND  PETER 

'Well,  Sir,  it's  Mary  who  always  'as  been  'ere,  Sir," — 
to  Windsor  to  be  with  Miss  Joan.  "And  it's  orders  no  one's 
flowed  to  upset  Miss  Phoebe  when  she's  writing.  Not  even 
Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham,  Sir.  I  dursu't  give  your  name, 
Sir,  even.  I  dursn't." 

"Except,"  she  added  reverentially,  "it's  Death  or  a  Fire." 

"You  aren't  the  Piano,  per'aps?"  she  asked. 

Oswald  had  to  confess  he  wasn't. 

The  little  servant  looked  sorry  for  him. 

And  that  was  in  truth  the  inexorable  law  now  of  The 
Ingle-Nook.  Aunt  Phoebe  was  taking  herself  very  seriously 
— as  became  a  Thinker  whose  Stitchwoman  papers,  deep, 
high,  and  occasionally  broad  in  thought,  were  running  into 
a  sale  of  tens  of  thousands.  So  she  sat  hard  and  close  at  her 
writing-table  from  half-past  nine  to  twelve  every  morning, 
secluded  and  defended  from  all  the  world,  correcting,  mus- 
ing deeply  over,  and  occasionally  reading  aloud  the  proofs 
of  the  third  series  of  Stitchwoman  papers.  (Old  Groom- 
bridge,  the  occasional  gardener,  used  to  listen  outside  in  awe 
and  admiration.  "My  word,  but  she  do  give  it  'em!"  old 
Groombridge  used  to  say.)  Oswald  perceived  that  there  was 
nothing  to  do  but  wait.  "I'll  wait,"  he  said,  "downstairs." 

"I  suppose  I  ought  to  let  you  in,"  said  the  little  servant, 
evidently  seeking  advice. 

"Oh,  decidedly,"  said  Oswald,  and  entered  the  room  in 
which  he  had  parted  from  Dolly  six  years  ago. 

The  door  closed  behind  the  little  servant,  and  Oswald 
found  himself  in  a  house  far  more  heavily  charged  with  mem- 
ories than  he  could  have  expected.  The  furniture  had  been 
but  little  altered ;  it  was  the  morning  time  again,  the  shadow 
masses  fell  in  the  same  places,  it  had  just  the  same  atmos- 
phere of  quiet  expectation  it  had  had  on  that  memorable  day 
before  the  door  beyond  had  opened  and  Dolly  had  appeared, 
subdued  and  ashamed,  to  tell  him  of  the  act  that  severed 
them  for  ever.  How  living  she  seemed  here  by  virtue  of 
those  inanimate  things!  Had  that  door  opened  now  he 
would  have  expected  to  see  her  standing  there  again.  And 
he  was  alive  still,  strong  and  active,  altered  just  a  little  by 
a  touch  of  fever  and  six  short  years  of  experience,  but  the 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  239 

same  thing  o"  impulse  and  desire  and  anger,  and  she  had  gone 
beyond  time  and  space,  beyond  hunger  or  desire.  He  had 
walked  between  this  window  and  this  fireplace  on  these  same 
bricks  on  which  he  was  pacing  now,  spitting  abuse  at  her,  a 
man  mad  with  shame  and  thwarted  desire.  Never  had  he 
forgiven  her,  or  stayed  his  mind  to  think  what  life  had  been 
for  her,  until  she  was  dead.  That  outbreak,  with  gesticulat- 
ing hands  and  an  angry,  grimacing  face,  had  been  her  last 
memory  of  him.  What  a  broken  image  he  had  made  of  him- 
self in  her  mind !  And  now  he  could  never  set  things  right 
vrith  her,  never  tell  her  of  his  belated  understanding  and 
pity.  "I  was  a  weak  thing,  confused  and  torn  between  my 
motives.  Why  did  you — you  who  were  my  lover — why  did 
you  not  help  me  after  I  had  stumbled?"  So  the  still  phan- 
tom in  that  room  reproached  him,  a  phantom  of  his  own  crea- 
tion, for  Dolly  had  never  reproached  him ;  to  the  end  she  had 
Lad  no  reproaches  in  her  heart  for  any  one  but  herself  be- 
cause of  their  disaster. 

"Hold  tight  to  love,  little  people,"  he  whispered.  "Hold 
tight  to  love.  .  .  .  But  we  don't,  we  don't.  ..." 

Never  before  had  Oswald  so  felt  the  tremendous  pitiful- 
ness  of  life.  He  felt  that  if  he  stayed  longer  in  this  room 
he  must  cry  out.  He  walked  to  the  garden  door  and  stood 
looking  at  the  empty  flagstone  path  between  the  dahlias  and 
sunflowers. 

It  was  all  as  if  he  had  but  left  it  yesterday,  except  for 
the  heartache  that  now  mingled  with  the  sunshine. 

"Pat — whack — pat — whack";  he  scarcely  heeded  that 
rhythmic  noise. 

Peter  had  gone  out  of  his  head  altogether.  He  walked 
slowly  along  the  pathway  towards  the  little  arbour  that  over- 
hung the  Weald.  Then,  turning,  he  discovered  Peter  with  a 
bat  in  his  hand,  regarding  him.  .  .  . 

Directly  Oswald  saw  Peter  he  marvelled  that  he  had  not 
been  eager  to  see  him  before.  The  boy  was  absurdly  like 
Dolly;  he  had  exactly  the  same  smile;  and  directly  he  saw 
the  gaunt  figure  of  his  one-eyed  guardian  he  cried  out,  "It's 
Nobby !"  with  a  voice  that  might  have  been  hers.  There  was 
a  squeak  of  genuine  delight  in  his  voice.  He  wasn't  at  all 


240  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  sturdy  little  thing  in  a  pinafore  that  Oswald  remem- 
bered, lie  seemed  indeed  at  the  first  glance  just  a  thin, 
flat-chested  little  Dolly  in  grey  flannel  trousers. 

He  had  obviously  been  bored  before  this  happy  arrival  of 
Oswald.  He  had  been  banging  a  rubber  ball  against  the 
scullery  with  a  cricket-bat  and  counting  hits  and  misses.  It 
is  a  poor  entertainment.  Oswald  did  not  realize  how  green 
his  memory  had  been  kept  by  the  Bungo-Peter  saga,  and 
Peter's  prompt  recognition  after  six  years  flattered  him. 

The  two  approached  one  another  slowly,  taking  each  other 
in. 

"You  remember  me?"  said  Oswald  superfluously. 

"Don't  I  just!     You  promised  me  a  lion's  skin." 

"So  I  did." 

He  could  not  bear  to  begin  this  new  relationship  as  a  de- 
faulter. "It's  on  its  way  to  you,"  he  equivocated,  making 
secret  plans. 

Peter,  tucking  his  bat  under  his  arm  and  burying  his 
hands  in  his  trouser  pockets,  drew  still  nearer.  At  a  dis- 
tance of  four  feet  or  thereabouts  he  stopped  short  and  Oswald 
stopped  short.  Peter  regarded  this  still  incredible  home- 
comer  with  his  head  a  little  on  one  side. 

"It  was  you,  used  to  tell  me  stories." 

"You  don't  remember  my  telling  you  stories?" 

"I  do.  About  the  Ba-ganda  who  live  in  U-ganda.  Don't 
you  remember  how  you  used  to  put  out  my  Zulus  and  my 
elephants  and  lions  on  the  floor  and  say  it  was  Africa.  You 
taught  us  roaring  like  lions — Joan  and  me.  Don't  you  re- 
member?" 

Oswald  remembered.  He  remembered  himself  on  all  fours 
with  the  children  on  the  floor  of  the  sunny  play-room  up- 
stairs, and  some  one  sometimes  standing,  sometimes  sitting 
above  the  game,  some  one  who  listened  as  keenly  as  the  chil- 
dren, some  one  at  whom  he  talked  about  that  world  of  lakes 
as  large  as  seas,  and  of  trackless,  sunless  forests  and  of  park- 
like  glades  and  wildernesses  of  flowers,  and  about  strings  of 
loaded  porters  and  of  encounters  with  marvelling  people  who 
had  never  before  set  eyes  on  a  European.  .  .  . 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  241 

§  9 

The  idea  that  the  guardianship  of  Peter  was  just  a  little 
duty  to  be  seen  to,  vanished  at  the  sight  of  him  in  favour 
of  the  realization  of  a  living  relationship.  There  are  mo- 
ments when  small  boys  of  ten  in  perfect  health  and  condition 
can  look  the  smallest,  flimsiest,  and  most  pathetic  of  created 
things — and  at  the  same  time  preternaturally  valiant  and 
intelligent.  They  take  on  a  likeness  to  sacred  flames  that 
may  at  any  moment  flicker  out.  More  particularly  does  this 
unconscious  camouflage  of  delicacy  occur  in  the  presence  of 
parents  and  guardians  already  in  a  state  of  self-reproach 
and  emotional  disorder.  Mr.  Grimes  with  an  eye  to  growth 
had  procured  a  grey  flannel  suit  a  little  too  large  for  Peter, 
but  it  never  occurred  to  Oswald  that  the  misfit  could  be  due 
to  anything  but  a  swift  and  ominous  shrinkage  of  the  boy. 
He  wanted  to  carry  him  off  forthwith  to  beer  and  cream  and 
sea-bathing. 

But  these  were  feelings  he  knew  he  must  not  betray. 

"I  must  tell  you  some  more  stories,"  he  said.  "I've  come 
back  to  England  to  live." 

"Here  ?"— brightly. 

"Well,  near  here.  But  I  shall  see  a  lot  of  vou  now, 
Peter." 

"I'll  like  that,"  said  Peter.  "I've  often  thought  of 
you.  .  .  ." 

A  pause. 

"You  broken  your  arm?"  said  Peter 

"Not  so  bad  as  that.  I've  got  to  have  some  bits  of  shell 
taken  out." 

"That  Egyptian  shell?     When  you  got  the  V.C.I" 

"I  never  told  you  of  the  Egyptian  shell?"  asked  Oswald. 

"Mummy  did.     Once.     Long  ago." 

Another  pause. 

"This  garden's  not  so  greatly  altered,  Peter,"  said  Oswald. 

"There's  a  Friendship's  Garden  up  that  end,"  said  Peter, 
indicating  the  end  by  a  movement  of  his  head.  "But  it 
isn't  much.  Aunt  Phoebe  started  it  and  forgot  it.  Every 
one  who  came  was  to  plant  something.  And  me  and  Joan 
have  gardens,  but  they've  got  all  weedy  now." 


242  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Let's  have  a  look  at  it  all,"  said  Oswald,  and  guardian 
and  ward  strolled  towards  the  steep. 

"The  Dahlias  are  splendid  this  year,"  Oswald  remarked, 
"and  these  Japanese  roses  are  covered  with  berries.  Splen- 
did, aren't  they?  One  can  make  a  jelly  of  them  Quite  a 
good  jelly.  And  let  me  see,  wasn't  there  a  little  summer- 
house  at  the  end  of  this  path  where  one  looked  over  the 
Weald?  Ah!  here  it  is.  Hardly  changed  at  all." 

He  sat  down.  Here  he  had  talked  with  Dolly  and  taken 
her  hand.  .  .  . 

He  bestirred  himself  to  talk. 

"And  exactly  how  old  are  you  now,  Peter?" 

"Ten  years  and  two  months,"  said  Peter. 

"We'll  have  to  find  a  school  for  you." 

"Have  you  been  in  Africa  since  I  saw  you?"  Peter  asked, 
avoiding  the  topic. 

"Since  you  saw  me" going  off,"  said  Oswald,  and  the  man 
glanced  at  the  boy  and  the  boy  glanced  at  the  man,  and  each 
was  wondering  what  the  other  remembered.  "I've  been  in 
Uganda  all  the  time.  There's  been  fighting  and  working. 
Some  day  you  must  go  to  Uganda  and  see  all  that  has  been 
done.  We've  made  a  good  railway  and  good  roads  and  tele- 
graphs. We've  put  down  robbers  and  cruelty." 

"And  shot  a  lot  of  lions?" 

"Plenty.  The  lions  were  pretty  awful  for  a  bit.  About 
Nairobi  and  along  the  line." 

"Shot  'em  when  they  were  coming  at  you?" 

"One  was  coming  straight  at  me." 

"That's  my  skin,"  said  Peter. 

Oswald  make  no  answer. 

"I'd  like  to  go  to  Africa,"  said  Peter. 

"You  shall." 

He  decided  to  begin  at  once  upon  his  neglected  task  of 
making  an  Imperial  citizen  according  to  the  ideas  that  pre- 
vailed before  the  advent  of  the  New  Imperialism.  "That 
sort  of  thing,"  he  said,  "is  what  we  Englishmen  are  for, 
you  know,  Peter.  What  our  sort  of  Englishman  is  for  any- 
how. We  have  to  go  about  the  world  and  make  roads  and 
keep  the  peace  and  see  fair  play.  We've  got  to  kill  big 
beasts  and  climb  hard  mountains.  That's  the  job  of  the 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  243 

Englishman.  He's  a  sort  of  policeman.  A  sort  of  working 
guardian  Not  a  nosy  slave-driver  trying  to  get  rich.  He 
chases  off  slave-drivers.  All  the  world's  his  beat.  India, 
Africa,  China,  and  the  East,  all  the  seas  of  the  world.  This 
little  fat  green  country,  all  trim  and  tidy  and  set  with  houses 
and  gardens,  isn't  much  of  a  land  for  a  man,  you  know — 
unless  he's  an  invalid.  It's  a  good  land  to  grow  up  in  and 
come  back  to  die  in.  Or  rest  in.  But  in  between,  no!" 

"No, "said  Peter. 

"No." 

"But  you  haven't  come  back  to  die,  Uncle  Nobby?" 

"No  fear.  But  I've  had  to  come  back.  I'm  resting. 
This  old  arm,  you  know,  and  all  that  sort  of  thing.  Just  for 
a  time.  .  .  .  And  besides  I  want  to  see  a  lot  of  you." 

"Yes." 

"You  have  to  grow  up  here  and  learn  all  you  can,  science 
and  all  sorts  of  things,  so  that  you  can  be  a  useful  man — 
wherever  you  have  to  go." 

"Africa,"  said  Peter. 

"Africa,  perhaps.  And  that's  why  one  has  to  go  to  school 
and  college — and  learn  all  about  it." 

"They  haven't  taught  me  much  about  it  yet,"  said  Peter. 

"Well,  you  haven't  been  to  much  in  the  way  of  schools," 
said  Oswald. 

"Are  there  better  schools?" 

"No  end.     We're  going  to  find  one,"  said  Oswald. 

"I  wish  school  was  over,"  said  Peter. 

"Why?     You've  got  no  end  to  learn  yet." 

"I  want  to  begin,"  said  Peter,  looking  out  across  the  tum- 
bled gentleness  of  the  Weald. 

"Begin  school?" 

"No,  begin — Africa,  India — doing  things." 

"School  first, "said  Oswald. 

"Are  there  schools  where  you  learn  about  guns  and  animals 
and  mountains  and  foreign  people?"  said  Peter. 

"There  must  be,"  said  Oswald.     "We'll  find  something." 

"Where  you  don't  do  Latin  and  parsing  and  'straction  of 
the  square  root." 

"Oh!  those  things  have  their  place." 

"Did  you  have  to  do  them,  Uncle  Nobby?" 


244  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Rather." 

"Were  they  useful  to  you?" 

"At  times — in  a  way.  Of  course  those  things  are  good  as 
training,  you  know — awfully  good.  Harden  up  the  mental 
muscles,  Peter." 

Peter  made  no  reply  to  that. 

Presently  Peter  said,  "Shall  I  learn  about  machines?" 

"When  you've  done  some  mathematics,  Peter." 

"I'd  like  to  fly,"  said  Peter. 

"That's  far  away  yet." 

"There  was  a  boy  at  that  school,  his  father  was  an  en- 
gineer; and  he  said  that  flying  machines  were  coming  quite 
soon." 

This  was  beyond  Oswald's  range. 

"The  French  have  got  a  balloon  that  steers  about,"  he 
said.  "That's  as  near  as  we  are  likely  to  come  to  flying  for 
a  long  time  yet." 

"This  boy  said  that  he  meant  a  real  flying  machine,  not  a 
balloon.  It  was  to  be  heavier  than  air.  It  would  fly  like  a 
kite  or  a  bird." 

"I  doubt  if  we'll  see  that  in  my  lifetime,"  said  Oswald; 
"or  yours,"  blind  to  the  fate  that  had  marked  Peter  for  its 
own. 

"H'm,"  said  Peter,  with  a  shadow  falling  upon  one  of  his 
brightest  dreams.  (Nobby  ought  to  know  these  things.  His 
word  ought  surely  to  be  final.  Still,  after  all,  this  chap's 
father  was  an  engineer.)  "I'd  love  to  fly,"  said  Peter. 

§  10 

Something  with  the  decorative  effect  of  a  broad  proces- 
sional banner  in  a  very  High  Church  indeed,  appeared  upon 
the  flagstone  path.  It  was  Aunt  Phoebe. 

She  had  come  out  into  the  garden  half  an  hour  before  her 
usual  time.  But  indeed  from  the  moment  when  she  had 
heard  Oswald  and  Peter  talking  in  the  garden  below  she  had 
been  unable  to  write  more.  After  some  futile  attempts  to 
pick  up  the  lost  thread  of  her  discourse,  she  had  gone  to  her 
bedroom  and  revised  her  toilet,  which  was  often  careless  in 
the  morning,  so  as  to  be  more  expressive  of  her  personality. 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  245 

She  was  wearing  a  long  djibbah-like  garment  with  a  richly 
embroidered  yoke,  she  had  sandals  over  her  brown  stockings, 
and  rather  by  way  of  symbol  of  authorship  than  for  any  im- 
mediate use  she  bore  a  big  leather  portfolio.  There  was 
moreover  now  a  gold-mounted  fountain  pen  amidst  the  other 
ingredients  of  the  cheerful  chatelaine  that  had  once  de- 
lighted Peter's  babyhood. 

She  seemed  a  fuller,  more  confident  person  than  Oswald 
remembered.  She  came  eloquent  with  apologies.  "I  have 
to  make  an  inexorable  rule,"  she  said,  "against  disturb- 
ances. As  if  I  were  a  man  writer  instead  of  a  mere  woman. 
Between  nine  and  one  I  am  a  woman  enclosed — cloistered — 
refused.  Sacred  hours  of  self -completeness.  Unspeakably 
precious  to  me.  Visitors  are  not  even  announced.  It  is  a 
law — inflexible. ' ' 

"We  must  all  respect  our  work,"  said  Oswald. 

"It's  over  now,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe,  smiling  like  the  sun 
after  clouds.  "It's  over  now  for  the  day.  I  am  just  human 
— until  tomorrow  again." 

"You  are  writing  a  book?"  Oswald  asked  rather  ineptly. 

"The  Stitchwoman;  Series  Three.  Much  is  expected; 
much  must  be  given.  I  am  the  slave  now  of  a  Following." 

Aunt  Phoebe  went  to  the  wall  and  stood  with  her  fine  pro- 
file raised  up  over  the  view.  She  was  a  little  breathless  and 
twitching  slightly,  but  very  magnificent.  Most  of  her  hair 
was  tidy.  "Our  old  Weald,  does  it  look  the  same?"  she 
asked. 

' '  Quite  the  same, ' '  said  Oswald,  standing  up  beside  her. 

"But  not  to  me,"  she  said.  Indeed  not  to  me.  To  me 
every  day  it  is  different.  Always  wide,  always  wonderful, 
but  different,  always  different.  I  know  it  so  well." 

Oswald  felt  she  had  worked  a  "catch"  on  him.  He  was 
faintly  nettled. 

"Still,"  he  said,  " f undamentalh*  one  must  recognize  that 
it's  the  same  Weald." 

"I  wonder,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe  suddenly,  looking  at  him 
very  intently,  and  then,  as  if  she  tasted  the  word,  "Funda- 
mentally?" 

"I  don't  know,"  she  added. 

Oswald  was  too  much  annoyed  to  reply. 


246  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"And  what  do  you  think  of  your  new  charge?"  she  asked. 
"I  don't  know  whether  Peter  quite  understands  that  yet. 
The  young  squire  goes  to  the  men.  He  casts  aside  childish 
things,  and  rides  out  in  his  little  Caparison  to  join  the  ranks. 
Do  you  know  that,  Peter?  Mr.  Sydenham  is  now  your  sole 
guardian." 

Peter  looked  at  Oswald  and  smiled  shyly,  and  his  cheeks 
flushed. 

"I  think  we  shall  get  on  together,"  said  Oswald. 

"Would  that  it  ended  there!     You  take  the  girl  too?" 

"It  is  not  my  doing,"  said  Oswald. 

Aunt  Phoebe  addressed  the  Weald. 

"Poor  Dolly!  So  it  is  that  the  mother  soul  cheats  itself. 
Through  the  ages — always  self-abnegation  for  the  woman." 
She  turned  to  Oswald.  ' '  If  she  had  had  time  to  think  I  am 
certain  she  would  not  have  excluded  women  from  this  trust. 
Certain.  What  have  men  to  do  with  education?  With  the 
education  of  a  woman  more  particularly.  The  Greater  from 
the  Less.  But  the  thing  is  done.  It  has  been  a  great  experi- 
ment, a  wonderful  experiment;  teaching,  I  learnt — but  I 
doubt  if  you  will  understand  that. ' ' 

There  was  a  slight  pause.  "What  exactly  was  the  nature 
of  the  experiment?"  asked  Oswald  modestly. 

"Feminine  influence.     Dominant." 

Oswald  considered.  "I  don't  know  if  you  include  Lady 
Charlotte,"  he  threw  out. 

"Oh!"  said  Aunt  Phoebe. 

"But  she  has  played  her  part,  I  gather." 

"Feminine !  No !  She  is  completely  a  Man-made  Woman. 
Quintessentially  the  Pampered  Squaw.  Holding  her  position 
by  her  former  charms.  A  Sex  Residuum.  Relict.  This  last 
outrage.  An  incident — merely.  Her  course  of  action  was 
dictated  for  her.  A  Man.  A  mere  solicitor.  One  Grimes. 
The  flimsiest  creature!  An  aspen  leaf — but  Male.  Male." 

Stern  thoughts  kept  Aunt  Phoebe  silent  for  a  time.  Then 
she  remarked  very  quietly,  "I  shook  him.  I  shook  him 
well." 

"I  hope  still  to  have  the  benefit  of  your  advice,"  said  Os- 
wald gravely. 

"Nay,"  she  said.     But  she  was  pleased.     "A  shy  com- 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  247 

ment,  perhaps.  But  the  difference  will  be  essential.  Don't 
expect  me  to  guide  you  as  you  would  wish  to  be  guided. 
That  phase  is  over  between  men  and  women.  We  hand  the 
children  over — since  the  law  will  have  it  so.  Take  them!" 

And  then  addressing  the  Weald,  Aunt  Phoebe,  in  vibrating 
accents,  uttered  a  word  that  was  to  be  the  keynote  of  £ 
decade  of  feminine  activities. 

"The  Vote,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe,  getting  a  wonderful  emo- 
tional buzz  into  her  voice.  ' '  The  Vo-o-o-o-o-te. ' ' 

§  11 

So  it  was  that  Oswald  found  himself  fully  invested  with 
his  responsibilities. 

There  was  a  terrifying  suggestion  in  Aunt  Phoebe's  man- 
ner that  he  would  presently  have  to  clap  Peter's  hat  on, 
make  up  a  small  bundle  of  Peter's  possessions,  and  fare  forth 
with  him  into  the  wide  world,  picking  up  the  convalescent  at 
Windsor  on  the  way,  but  that  was  a  misapprehension  of 
Aunt  Phoebe's  intentions.  And,  after  all,  it  was  Peter's 
house  and  garden  if  it  came  to  that.  For  a  time  at  least 
things  could  go  on  as  they  were.  But  the  task  of  direction 
was  now  fully  his.  Whether  these  two  young  people  were 
properly  educated  or  not,  whether  they  too  became  slackers 
and  inadequate  or  worthy  citizens  of  this  great  empire, 
rested  now  entirely  in  his  hands. 

"They  must  have  the  best,"  he  said.  .  .  . 

The  best  was  not  immediately  apparent. 

From  Chastlands  and  his  two  rooms  at  the  Climax  Club 
Oswald  conducted  his  opening  researches  for  the  educational 
best,  and  whenever  he  was  at  Chastlands  he  came  over  nearly 
every  day  to  The  Ingle-Nook  on  his  bicycle  It  was  a  well- 
remembered  road.  Scarcely  was  there  a  turn  in  it  that  did 
not  recall  some  thought  of  the  former  time  when  he  had  rid- 
den over  daily  for  a  sight  of  Dolly;  he  would  leave  his 
bicycle  in  a  clump  of  gorse  by  the  high  road  that  was  surely 
an  outgrown  fragment  of  the  old  bush  in  which  he  had  been 
wont  to  leave  it  six  years  before;  he  would  walk  down  the 
same  rusty  path,  and  his  heart  would  quicken  as  it  used  to 
quicken  at  the  thought  of  seeing  Dolly.  But  presently  Peter 


248  JOAN  AND  PETER 

began  to  oust  Dolly  from  his  thoughts.  Sometimes  Peter 
would  be  standing  waiting  for  him  by  the  high  road.  Some- 
times Peter,  mounted  on  a  little  outgrown  bicycle,  would 
meet  him  on  the  purple  common  half  way. 

A  man  and  a  boy  of  ten  are  perhaps  better  company  than 
a  man  and  a  boy  of  fifteen.  There 's  so  much  less  egotism  be- 
tween them.  At  any  rate  Peter  and  Oswald  talked  of  educa- 
tion and  travel  and  politics  and  philosophy  with  unembar- 
rassed freedom.  Oswald,  like  most  childless  people,  had  had 
no  suspicion  of  what  the  grey  matter  of  a  bright  little  boy's 
brain  can  hold.  He  was  amazed  at  Peter's  views  and  curi- 
osities. It  was  Oswald's  instinct  never  to  talk  "down"  to 
man,  woman  or  child.  He  had  never  thought  about  it,  but 
if  you  had  questioned  him  he  would  have  told  you  that  that 
was  the  sort  of  thing  one  didn't  do.  And  this  instinct  gave 
him  a  wide  range  of  available  companionship.  Peter  had 
never  conceived  such  good  company  as  Oswald.  You  could 
listen  to  Oswald  for  hours.  They  discoursed  upon  every 
topic  out  of  dreamland.  And  sometimes  they  came  very 
close  even  to  that  dreamland  where  Bungo  Peter  adventured 
immortally.  Oswald  would  feel  a  transfiguring  presence,  a 
touch  of  fantasy  and  half  suspect  their  glorious  companion. 

Much  of  their  talk  was  a  kind  of  story-telling. 

"How  should  we  go  to  the  Congo  Forest?"  Peter  would 
ask.  ' '  Would  one  go  by  Nairobi  ? ' ' 

"No,  that's  the  other  way.     We'd  have  to  go " 

And  forthwith  Nobby  and  Peter  were  getting  their  stuff 
together  and  counting  how  many  porters  they  would 
need.  .  .  . 

"One  day  perhaps  we'd  come  upon  a  place  'fested  with 
crocodiles,"  Peter  would  say. 

"We  would.  You  would  be  pushing  rather  ahead  of  the 
party  with  your  guns,  looking  for  anything  there  might  be — 
pushing  through  tall  reeds  far  above  your  head,"  Oswald 
would  oblige. 

"You'd  be  with  me,"  insisted  Peter.  .  .  . 

It  was  really  story-telling.  .  .  . 

It  was  Peter's  habit  in  those  days  when  he  was  alone  to 
meditate  on  paper.  He  would  cover  sheet  after  sheet  with 
rapidly  drawn  scenes  of  adventure.  One  day  Oswald  found 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  249 

himself  figuring  in  one  of  these  dream  pictures.  He  and 
Peter  were  leading  an  army  in  cattle.  "Capture  ot  Ten 
War  Elephants"  was  the  legend  thereon.  But  he  realized 
how  clearly  the  small  boy  saw  him.  Nothing  was  spared  of 
the  darkened,  browless  side  of  his  face  with  its  asymmetrical 
glass  eye,  the  figure  of  him  was  very  long  and  lean  and  bent, 
with  its  arm  still  in  its  old  sling;  and  it  was  drawn  mani- 
festly with  the  utmost  confidence  and  admiration  and 
love.  .  .  . 

Peter's  hostility  to  schools  was  removed  very  slowly.  The 
lessons  at  High  Cross  had  scarred  him  badly,  and  about  Miss 
Mills  clung  associations  of  the  utmost  dreariness.  Still  it 
was  Oswald's  instinct  to  consult  the  young  man  on  his  des- 
tiny. 

"There's  a  lot  you  don't  know  yet,"  said  Oswald. 

' '  Can 't  I  read  it  out  of  books  ? ' '  asked  Peter. 

"You  can't  read  everything  out  of  books,"  said  Oswald. 
"There's  things  you  ought  to  see  and  handle.  And  things 
you  can  only  learn  by  doing." 

Oswald  wanted  Peter  to  plan  his  own  school. 

Peter  considered.  "I'd  like  lessons  about  the  insides  of 
animals,  and  about  the  people  in  foreign  countries — and  how 
engines  work — and  all  that  sort  of  thing." 

"Then  we  must  find  a  school  for  you  where  they  teach  all 
that  sort  of  thing,"  said  Oswald,  as  though  it  was  merely  a 
question  of  ordering  goods  from  the  Civil  Service  Stores.  .  .  . 

He  had  much  to  learn  yet  about  education. 

§  12 

But  Oswald  was  still  only  face  to  face  with  the  half  of  his 
responsibility. 

One  morning  he  found  Peter  at  the  schoolroom  table  very 
busy  cutting  big  letters  out  of  white  paper.  Beside  him  was 
a  long  strip  of  Turkey  twill  from  the  dressing-up  box  that 
The  Ingle-Nook  had  plagiarized  from  the  Sheldricks.  "I'm 
getting  ready  for  Joan,"  said  Peter.  "I'm  going  to  put 
'Welcome'  on  this  for  over  the  garden  gate.  And  there's  to 
be  a  triumphal  arch." 

Hitherto  Peter  had  scarcely  betrayed  any  interest  in  Joan 


250  JOAN  AND  PETER 

at  all,  now  he  seemed  able  to  think  of  no  one  else,  and  Oswald 
found  himself  reduced  abruptly  from  the  position  of  centre 
of  Peter's  universe  to  a  mere  helper  in  the  decorations.  But 
he  was  beginning  to  understand  the  small  boy  by  this  time, 
and  he  took  the  withdrawal  of  the  limelight  philosophically. 

When  Aunt  Phyllis  and  Joan  arrived  they  found  the 
flagged  path  from  the  "Welcome"  gate  festooned  with  chains 
of  coloured  paper  (bought  with  Peter's  own  pocket-money 
and  made  by  him  and  Oswald,  with  some  slight  assistance 
and  much  moral  support  from  Aunt  Phoebe  in  the  evening) 
to  the  door.  Tlie  triumphal  arch  had  been  achieved  rather  in 
the  Gothic  style  by  putting  the  movable  Badminton  net  posts 
into  a  sort  of  trousering  of  assorted  oriental  cloths  from  the 
dressing-up  chest,  and  crossing  two  heads  of  giant  Heracleum 
between  them.  Peter  stood  at  the  door  in  the  white  satin 
suit  his  innocent  vanity  loved — among  other  roles  it  had 
served  for  Bassanio,  Prince  Hal,  and  Antony  (over  the  body 
of  Caesar) — with  a  face  of  extraordinary  solemnity.  Behind 
him  stood  Uncle  Nobby. 

Joan  wasn't  quite  the  Joan  that  Peter  expected.  She  was 
still  wan  from  her  illness  and  she  had  grown  several  inches. 
She  was  as  tall  as  he.  And  she  was  white-faced,  so  that  her 
hair  seemed  blacker  than  ever,  and  her  eyes  were  big  and 
lustrous.  She  came  walking  slowly  down  the  path  with  her 
eyes  wide  open.  There  was  a  difference,  he  felt,  in  her 
movement  as  she  came  forward,  though  he  could  not  have 
said  what  it  was ;  there  was  more  grace  in  Joan  now  and  less 
vigour.  But  it  was  the  same  Joan's  voice  that  cried,  "Oh, 
Petah !  It's  lovely!"  She  stood  before  him  for  a  moment 
and  then  threw  her  arms  about  him.  She  hugged  him  and 
kissed  him,  and  Uncle  Nobby  knew  that  it  was  the  smear  of 
High  Cross  School  that  made  him  wriggle  out  of  her  embrace 
and  not  return  her  kisses. 

But  immediately  he  took  her  by  the  hand. 

"It's  better  in  the  playroom,  Joan,"  he  said. 

"All  right,  Joan,  go  on  with  him,"  said  Oswald,  and  came 
forward  to  meet  Aunt  Phyllis.  Aunt  Pha'be  was  on  the 
staircase  a  little  aloof  from  these  things,  as  became  a  woman 
of  intellect,  and  behind  Aunt  Phyllis  came  Mary,  and  behind 
Mary  came  the  Limpsfield  cabman  with  Aunt  Phyllis 's  trunk 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  251 

upon  his  shoulder,  and  demolished  the  triumphal  arch.  But 
Peter  did  not  learn  of  that  disaster  until  later,  and  then  he 
did  not  mind ;  it  had  served  its  purpose. 

The  playroom  (it  was  the  old  nursery  rechristened)  was 
indeed  better.  It  was  all  glorious  with  paper  chains  of 
green  and  white  festooned  from  corner  to  corner.  On  the 
floor  to  the  right  under  the  window  was  every  toy  soldier 
that  Peter  possessed  drawn  up  in  review  array — a  gorgeous 
new  Scots  Grey  band  in  the  front  that  Oswald  had  given 
him.  But  that  was  nothing.  The  big  arm-chair  had  been 
drawn  out  into  the  middle  of  the  room,  and  on  it  was  Peter's 
own  lion-skin.  And  a  piece  of  red  stair-carpet  had  been  put 
for  Joan  to  go  up  to  the  throne  upon.  And  beside  the 
throne  was  a  little  table,  and  on  the  table  was  a  tinsel  robe 
from  Clarkson's  and  a  wonderful  gilt  crown  and  a  sceptre. 
Oswald  had  brought  them  along  that  morning. 

"The  crown  is  for  you,  Joan!"  said  Peter.  "The  sceptre 
was  bought  for  you." 

Little  white-faced  Joan  stood  stockishly  with  the  crown  in 
one  hand  and  the  sceptre  in  the  other.  "Put  the  crown  on, 
Joan,"  said  Peter.  "It's  yours.  It's  a  rest 'rat  ion  cere- 
mony. ' ' 

But  she  didn't  put  it  on. 

"It's  lovely — and  it's  lovely,"  whispered  Joan  in  a  sort 
of  rapture,  and  stared  about  her  incredulously  with  her  big 
dark  eyes.  It  was  home  again — home,  and  Mrs.  Pybus  had 
passed  like  an  evil  dream  in  the  night.  She  had  never  really 
believed  it  possible  before  that  Mrs.  Pybus  could  pass  away. 
Even  while  Aunt  Phyllis  and  Mary  had  been  nursing  her, 
Mrs.  Pybus  had  hovered  iii  the  background  like  something 
more  enduring,  waiting  for  them  to  pass  away  as  inexpli- 
cably as  they  had  come.  Joan  had  heard  the  whining  voice 
upon  the  stairs  every  day  and  always  while  she  was  ill,  and 
once  Mrs.  Pybus  had  come  and  stood  by  her  bedside  and  re- 
marked like  one  who  maintains  an  argument,  "She'll  be 
'appy  enough  'ere  when  she's  better  again." 

\o  more  .l/r.s\  Pi/bits!  No  more  whining  scoldings.  No 
more  unexpected  slaps  and  having  to  go  to  bed  supperless. 
No  more  measles  and  uneasy  misery  in  a  bed  with  grey 
sheets.  No  more  dark  dreadful  sayings  that  lurked  in 


252  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  mind  like  jungle  beasts.  She  was  home,  home  with  Peter, 
out  of  that  darkness.  .  .  . 

And  yet — outside  was  the  darkness  still.  .  .  . 

''Joan,"  said  Peter,  trying  to  rouse  her.  "There's  a 
cake  like  a  birthday  for  tea.  ..." 

When  Oswald  came  in  she  was  still  holding  the  gilt  crown 
in  her  hand. 

She  let  Peter  take  it  from  her  and  put  it  on  her  head,  still 
stantig  incredulously  about  her.  She  took  the  sceptre 
limply.  Peter  was  almost  gentle  with  this  strange,  staring 
Joan. 

§  13 

For  some  days  Oswald  regarded  Joan  as  a  grave  and 
thoughtful  child.  She  seemed  to  be  what  country  people  call 
"old-fashioned."  She  might  have  been  a  changeling.  He 
did  not  hear  her  laugh  once.  And  she  followed  Peter  about 
as  if  she  was  his  shadow. 

Then  one  day  as  he  cycled  over  from  Chastlands  he  heard 
a  strange  tumult  proceeding  from  a  little  field  on  Master's 
farm,  a  marvellous  mixture  of  familiar  and  unfamiliar 
sounds,  an  uproar,  wonderful  as  though  a  tinker's  van  had 
met  a  school  treat  and  the  twain  had  got  drunk  together. 
The  source  of  this  row  was  hidden  from  him  by  a  little  cop- 
pice, and  he  dismounted  and  went  through  the  wood  to  inves- 
tigate. Joan  and  Peter  had  discovered  a  disused  cowshed 
with  a  sloping  roof  of  corrugated  iron,  and  they  had  also 
happened  upon  an  abandoned  kettle  and  two  or  three  tin 
cans.  They  were  now  engaged  in  hurling  these  latter  ob- 
jects on  to  the  resonant  roof,  down  which  they  rolled  thun- 
derously only  to  be  immediately  returned.  Joan  was  no 
longer  a  slip  of  pensive  dignity,  Peter  was  no  longer  a  marvel 
of  intellectual  curiosities.  They  were  both  shrieking  their 
maximum.  Oswald  had  never  before  suspected  Joan  of  an 
exceptionally  full  voice,  nor  Peter  of  so  vast  a  wealth  of 
gurgling  laughter.  "Keep  the  Pot-A-boilin '  "  yelled  Joan. 
"Keep  the  Pot-A-boilin'." 

"IIoo!"  cried  Peter.     "Hoo!     Go  it,  Joan.    Wow!" 

And  then,  to  crown  the  glory,  the  kettle  burst.     It  came 


OSWALD  TAKES  CONTROL  253 

into  two  pieces.  That  was  too  perfect!  The  two  children 
staggered  back.  Each  seized  a  half  of  the  kettle  and  kicked 
it  deliberately.  Then  they  rolled  away  and  fell  on  their 
stomachs  amidst  the  grass,  kicking  their  legs  in  the  air. 

But  the  spirit  of  rowdyism  grows  with  what  it  feeds  upon. 

"Oh,  let's  do  something  reely  awful!"  cried  Joan.  "Let's 
do  something  recly  awful,  Petah!" 

Peter's  legs  became  still  and  stiff  with  interrogation. 

"Oh,  Petah!"  said  Joan.  "If  I  could  only  smash  a  win- 
dow. Frow  a  brick  frough  a  real  window,  a  Big  Glass  Win- 
dow. Just  one  Glass  Window." 

"Where's  a  window?"  said  Peter,  evidently  in  a  highly 
receptive  condition. 

From  which  pitch  of  depravity  Oswald  roused  him  by  a 
prod  in  the  back.  .  .  . 

§  14 

But  after  that  Joan  changed  rapidly.  Colour  crept  back 
into  her  skin,  arid  a  faintly  rollicking  quality  into  her  bear- 
ing. She  became  shorter  again  and  visibly  sturdier,  and  her 
hair  frizzed  more  and  stuck  out  more.  Her  laugh  and  her 
comments  upon  the  world  became  an  increasingly  frequent 
embroidery  upon  the  quiet  of  The  Ingle-Nook.  She  seemed 
to  have  a  delusion  that  Peter  was  just  within  earshot,  but 
only  just. 

Oswald  wondered  how  far  her  recent  experiences  had 
vanished  from  her  mind.  He  thought  they  might  have  done 
so  altogether  until  one  day  Joan  took  him  into  her  confidence 
quite  startlingly.  He  was  smoking  in  the  little  arbour,  and 
she  came  and  stood  beside  him  so  noiselessly  that  he  did  not 
know  she  was  there  until  she  spoke.  She  was  holding  her 
hands  behind  her,  and  she  was  regarding  the  South  Downs 
with  a  pensive  frown.  She  was  paying  him  the  most  beauti- 
ful compliment.  She  had  come  to  consult  him. 

"Mrs.  Pybus  said,"  she  remarked,  "that  every  one  who 
doesn't  believe  there's  a  God  goes  straight  to  Hell.  .  .  . 

"I  don't  believe  there's  a  God,"  said  Joan,  "and  Peter 
knows  there  isn't." 

For  a  moment  Oswald  was  a  little  taken  aback  by  this 


254  JOAN  AND  PETER 

simple  theology.  Then  he  said,  "D'you  think  Peter's  looked 
everywhere,  Joan?" 

Then  he  saw  the  real  point  at  issue.  "One  thing  you 
may  be  sure  about,  Joan,"  he  said,  "and  that  is  that  there 
isn't  a  Hell.  Which  is  rather  a  pity  in  its  way,  because  it 
would  be  nice  to  think  of  this  Mrs.  Pybus  of  yours  going 
there.  But  there's  no  Hell  at  all.  There's  nothing  more 
dreadful  than  the  dreadful  things  in  life.  There's  no  need 
to  worry  about  Hell. ' ' 

That  he  thought  was  fairly  conclusive.  But  Joan  re- 
mained pensive,  with  her  eyes  still  on  the  distant  hills. 
Then  she  asked  one  of  those  unanswerable  children's  ques- 
tions that  are  all  implication,  imputation,  assumption,  mis- 
understanding, and  elision. 

"But  if  there  isn't  a  Hell,"  said  Joan,  "what  does  God 
do?" 

§  15 

It  was  after  Joan  had  drifted  away  again  from  these 
theological  investigations  that  Oswald,  after  sitting  some  time 
in  silence,  said  aloud  and  with  intense  conviction,  "I  love 
these  children." 

He  was  no  longer  a  stranger  in  England;  he  had  a  living 
anchorage.  He  looked  out  over  the  autumnal  glories  of  the 
Weald,  dreaming  intentions.  These  children  must  be  edu- 
cated. They  must  be  educated  splendidly.  Oswald  wanted 
to  see  Peter  serving  the  empire.  The  boy  would  have  pluck 
— he  had  already  the  loveliest  brain — and  a  sense  of  fun. 
And  Joan  ?  Oswald  was,  perhaps,  not  quite  so  keen  in  those 
days  upon  educating  Joan.  That  was  to  come  later.  .  .  . 

After  all,  the  empire,  indeed  the  whole  world  of  mankind, 
is  made  up  of  Joans  and  Peters.  What  the  empire  is,  what 
mankind  becomes,  is  nothing  but  the  sum  of  what  we  have 
made  of  the  Joans  and  Peters. 


CHAPTER  THE  TENTH 

A   SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS 
§    1 

SO  it  was  that  a  systematic  intention  took  hold  of  the 
lives  of  Joan  and   Peter.     They  had  been   snatched 
apart  adventurously  and  disastrously  out  of  the  hands 
of  an  aimless  and  impulsive  modernism  and  dragged  oft'  into 
dusty  and  decaying  corners  of  the  Anglican  system.     Now 
they  were  to  be  rescued  by  this  Empire  worshipper,  this  dis- 
figured and  suffering  educational  fanatic,  and  taught ? 

What  was  there  in  Oswald's  mind?  His  intentions  were 
still  sentimental  and  cloudy,  but  they  were  beginning  to  as- 
sume a  firm  and  definite  form.  Just  as  the  Uganda  children 
were  being  made  into  civilized  men  and  women  according  to 
the  lights  and  means  of  the  Protectorate  government,  so  these 
two  children  had  to  be  made  fit  rulers  and  servants  of  the 
greatest  empire  in  the  world.  They  had  to  know  all  that  a 
ruling  race  should  know,  they  had  to  think  and  act  as  be- 
fitted a  leading  people.  All  this  seemed  to  him  the  simple 
and  obvious  necessity  of  the  case.  But  he  was  a  sick  man, 
fatigued  much  more  readily  than  most  men,  given  to  moods 
of  bitter  irritability;  he  had  little  knowledge  of  how  he 
might  set  about  this  task,  he  did  not  know  what  help  was 
available  and  what  was  impossible.  He  made  enquiries  and 
some  were  very  absurd  enquiries;  he  sought  advice  and 
talked  to  all  sorts  of  people;  and  meanwhile  Joan  and  Peter 
spent  a  very  sunny  and  pleasant  November  running  wild 
about  Limpsfield — until  one  day  Oswald  noted  as  much  and 
packed  them  off  for  the  rest  of  the  term  to  Miss  Mtirgatroyd 
again.  The  School  of  St.  George  and  the  Venerable  Uede 
was  concentrating  upon  a  Christmas  production  of  Alice  in 
Wonderland.  There  could  not  be  very  much  bad  teaching 
anyhow,  and  there  would  be  plenty  of  fun. 

255 


256  JOAN  AND  PETER 

How  is  one  to  learn  where  one's  children  may  be  educated? 

This  story  has  its  comic  aspects :  Oswald  went  first  to  the 
Education  Department! 

He  thought  that  if  one  had  two  rather  clever  and  hopeful 
children  upon  whom  one  was  prepared  to  lavish  time  and 
money,  an  Imperial  Education  Department  would  be  able  to 
tell  an  anxious  guardian  what  schools  existed  for  them  and 
the  respective  claims  and  merits  and  inter-relationships  of 
such  schools.  But  he  found  that  the  government  which  pub- 
lished a  six-inch  map  of  the  British  Isles  on  which  even  the 
meanest  outhouse  is  marked,  had  no  information  for  the  en- 
quiring parent  or  guardian  at  all  in  this  matter  of  schools. 
An  educational  map  had  still  to  become  a  part  of  the  equip- 
ment of  the  civilized  state.  As  it  was  inconceivable  that 
party  capital  could  be  made  out  of  the  production  of  such  a 
map,  it  was  likely  to  remain  a  desideratum  in  Great  Britain 
for  many  years  to  come. 

In  aji  interview  that  remained  dignified  on  one  side  at 
least  until  the  last,  Oswald  was  referred  to  the  advertise- 
ment columns  of  The  Times  and  the  religious  and  educational 
papers,  and  to — "a  class  of  educational  agents,"  said  the  of- 
ficial with  extreme  detachment.  "Usually,  of  course,  people 
hear  of  schools." 

So  it  was  that  England  still  referred  back  to  the  happy 
days  of  the  eighteenth  century  when  our  world  was  small 
enough  for  everybody  to  know  and  trust  and  consult  every- 
body, and  tell  in  a  safe  and  confidential  manner  everything 
that  mattered. 

"Oh,  my  God!"  groaned  Oswald  suddenly,  giving  way  to 
his  internal  enemies.  "My  God!  Here  are  two  children, 
brilliant  children — with  plenty  of  money  to  be  spent  on 
them!  Doesn't  the  Empire  care  a  twopenny  dam  what  be- 
comes of  them?" 

"There  is  an  Association  of  Private  Schoolmasters,  I  be- 
lieve," said  the  official,  staring  at  him;  "but  I  don't  know 
if  it's  any  good." 

§  2 

Joan  was  rehearsing  a  special  dance  in  costume  and  Peter 
was  word-perfect  as  the  White  Knight  long  before  Oswald 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        257 

had  found  even  a  hopeful  school  for  either  of  them.  He 
clung  for  some  time  to  the  delusion  that  there  must 
exist  somewhere  a  school  that  would  exactly  meet  Peter's 
natural  and  reasonable  demand  for  an  establishment  where 
one  would  learn  about  "guns  and  animals,  mountains,  ma- 
chines and  foreign  people,"  that  would  give  lessons  about 
"the  insides  of  animals"  and  "how  engines  work"  and  "all 
that  sort  of  thing."  The  man  wanted  a  school  kept  by 
Leonardo  da  Vinci.  When  he  found  a  curriculum  singu- 
larly bare  of  these  vital  matters,  he  began  to  ask  questions. 

His  questions  presently  developed  into  a  very  tiresome  and 
trying  Catechism  for  Schoolmasters.  He  did  not  allow  for 
the  fact  that  most  private  schoolmasters  in  England  were 
rather  overworked  and  rather  under-exercised  men  with  con- 
siderable financial  worries.  Indeed,  he  made  allowances  for 
no  one.  He  wanted  to  get  on  with  the  education  of  Joan 
and  Peter — and  more  particularly  of  Peter. 

His  Catechism  varied  considerably  in  detail,  but  always  it 
ran  upon  the  lines  of  the  following  questions. 

"What  sort  of  boy  are  you  trying  to  make?" 

"How  will  he  differ  from  an  uneducated  boy? 

"I  don't  mean  in  manners,  I  mean  how  will  he  differ  in 
imagination?" 

"Yes — I  said — imagination." 

"Don't  you  know  that  education  is  building  up  an  imag- 
ination? I  thought  everybody  knew  that." 

"Then  what  is  education  doing?" 

Here  usually  the  Catechized  would  become  troublesome 
and  the  Catechist  short  and  rude.  The  Catechism  would  be 
not  so  much  continued  as  resumed  after  incivilities  and  a 
silence. 

'What  sort  of  curriculum  is  my  ward  to  go  through?" 
'Why  is  he  to  do  Latin?" 
'Why  is  he  to  do  Greek?" 

'Is  he  going  to  read  or  write  or  speak  these  languages?" 
'Then  what  is  the  strange  and  peculiar  benefit  of  them?" 
'What  will  my  ward  know  about  Africa  when  you  have 
done  with  him?" 

"What  will  he  know  about  India?  Are  there  any  Indian 
boys  here  ? ' ' 


258  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"What  will  he  know  about  Garibaldi  and  Italy?  About 
engineering?  About  Darwin?" 

"Will  he  be  able  to  write  good  English?" 

"Do  your  boys  do  much  German?  Russian?  Spanish  or 
Hindustani?" 

"Will  he  know  anything  about  the  way  the  Royal  Ex- 
change affects  the  Empire?  But  why  shouldn't  he  under- 
stand the  elementary  facts  of  finance  and  currency?  Why 
shouldn't  every  citizen  understand  what  a  pound  sterling 
really  means?  All  our  everyday  life  depends  on  that. 
What  do  you  teach  about  Socialism?  Nothing!  Did  you 
say  Nothing?  But  he  may  be  a  member  of  Parliament  some 
day.  Anyhow  he'll  be  a  voter." 

"But  if  you  can't  teach  him  everything  why  not  leave  out 
these  damned  classics  of  yours?"  .  .  . 

The  record  of  an  irritable  man  seeking  the  impossible  is 
not  to  be  dwelt  upon  too  closely.  During  his  search  for  the 
boys'  school  that  has  yet  to  exist,  Oswald  gave  way  to  some 
unhappy  impulses;  he  made  himself  distressing  and  exas- 
perating to  quite  a  number  of  people.  From  the  first  his 
attitude  to  scholastic  agents  was  hostile  and  uncharitable. 
His  appearance  made  them  nervous  and  defensive  from  the 
outset,  more  particularly  the  fierce  cocking  of  his  hat  and 
the  red  intensity  of  his  eye.  He  came  in  like  an  accusation 
rather  than  an  application. 

"And  tell  me,  are  these  all  the  schools  there  are?"  he 
would  ask,  sitting  with  various  printed  and  copygraphed 
papers  in  his  hand. 

"All  we  can  recommend,"  the  genteel  young  man  in  charge 
would  say. 

"All  you  are  paid  to  recommend?"  Oswald  would  ask. 

"They  are  the  best  schools  available,"  the  genteel  young 
man  would  fence. 

"Bah!"  Oswald  would  say. 

A  bad  opening.  .  .  . 

From  the  ruffled  scholastic  agents  Oswald  would  go  on  in 
a  mood  that  was  bound  to  ruffle  the  hopeful  school  proprietor. 
Indeed  some  of  these  interviews  became  heated  so  soon  and 
so  extravagantly  that  there  was  a  complete  failure  to  state 
even  the  most  elementary  facts  of  the  case.  Lurid  misun- 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS         259 

derstandings  blazed.  Uganda  got  perplexingly  into  the  dis- 
pute. From  one  admirable  establishment  in  Eastbourne  Os- 
wald retreated  with  its  principal  calling  after  him  from  his 
dignified  portico,  "I  wouldn't  take  the  little  nigger  at  any 
price. ' ' 

When  his  doctor  saw  him  after  this  last  encounter  he  told 
him;  "You  are  not  getting  on  as  well  as  you  ought  to  do. 
You  are  running  about  too  much:  You  ought  to  be  resting 
completely." 

So  Oswald  took  a  week's  rest  from  school  visiting  before 
he  tried  again. 

§  3 

If  it  had  not  been  for  the  sense  of  Joan  and  Peter  growing 
visibly  day  by  day,  Oswald  might  perhaps  have  displayed 
more  of  the  patience  of  the  explorer.  But  his  was  rather 
the  urgency  of  a  thirsty  traveller  who  looks  for  water  than 
the  deliberation  of  a  trigonometrical  survey.  In  a  little 
while  he  mastered  the  obvious  fact  that  preparatory  schools 
were  conditioned  by  the  schools  for  which  they  prepared. 
He  found  a  school  at  Margate,  White  Court,  which  differed 
rather  in  quality,  and  particularly  in  the  quality  of  its  pro- 
prietor, than  in  the  nature  of  its  arrangements  from  the 
other  schools  he  had  been  visiting,  and  to  this  he  committed 
Peter.  Assisted  by  Aunt  Phyllis  he  found  an.  education  for 
Joan  in  Ilighmorton  School,  ten  miles  away;  he  settled  him- 
self in  a  furnished  house  at  Margate  to  be  near  them  both; 
and  having  thus  gained  a  breathing  time,  he  devoted  himself 
to  a  completer  study  of  the  perplexing  chaos  of  upper-class 
education  in  England.  What  was  it  "up  to"?  He  had  his 
own  clear  conviction  of  what  it  ought  to  be  up  to,  but  the 
more  he  saw  of  existing  conditions,  the  more  hopelessly  it 
seemed  to  be  up  to  either  entirely  different  things  or  else,  in 
a  spirit  of  intellectual  sabotage,  up  to  nothing  at  all.  From 
the  preparatory  schools  he  went  on  to  the  great  public  schools, 
and  from  the  public  schools  he  went  to  the  universities.  He 
brought  to  the  quest  all  the  unsympathetic  detachment  of  an 
alien  observer  and  all  the  angry  passion  of  an  anxious  pa- 
triot. With  some  suggestions  from  Matthew  Arnold. 


260  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Indolence."  ''Insincerity."  These  two  words  became 
more  and  more  frequent  in  his  thoughts  as  he  went  from  one 
great  institution  to  another.  Occasionally  the  headmasters 
he  talked  to  had  more  than  a  suspicion  of  his  unspoken  com- 
ments. "Their  imaginations  are  dead  within  them,"  said 
Oswald.  "If  only  they  could  see  the  Empire!  If  only  they 
could  forget  their  little  pride  and  dignity  and  affectations 
in  the  vision  of  mankind ! '  '• 

His  impressions  of  headmasters  were  for  the  most  part 
taken  against  a  background  of  white-flannelled  boys  in  play- 
ing-fields or  grey-flannelled  boys  in  walled  court-yards. 
Eton  gave  him  its  river  effects  and  a  bright,  unforgetable 
boatman  in  a  coat  of  wonderful  blue;  Harrow  displayed  its 
view  and  insisted  upon  its  hill.  Physically  he  liked  almost 
all  the  schools  he  saw,  except  Winchester,  which  he  visited 
on  a  rainy  day.  Almost  always  there  were  tine  architectural 
effects;  now  there  was  a  nucleus  of  Gothic,  now  it  was  time- 
worn  Tudor  red  brick,  now  well-proportioned  grey  Georgian. 
Most  of  these  establishments  had  the  dignity  of  age,  but 
Caxton  was  wealthily  new.  Caxton  was  a  nest  of  new  build- 
ings of  honey-coloured  stone;  it  was  growing  energetically 
but  tidily;  it  waved  its  hand  to  a  busy  wilderness  of  rocks 
and  plants  and  said,  "our  botanical  garden,"  to  a  piece  of 
field  and  said  "our  museum  group."  But  it  had  science 
laboratories  with  big  apparatus,  and  the  machinery  for  a 
small  engineering  factory.  Oswald  with  an  experienced  eye 
approved  of  its  biological  equipment.  All  these  great  schools 
were  visibly  full  of  life  and  activity.  At  times  Oswald  was 
so  impressed  by  this  life  and  activity  that  he  felt  ashamed  of 
his  enquiries;  it  seemed  ungracious  not  to  suppose  that  all 
was  going  well  here,  that  almost  any  of  these  schools  was 
good  enough  and  that  almost  any  casual  or  sentimental  con- 
siderations, Sydenham  family  traditions  or  the  like,  should 
suffice  to  determine  which  was  to  have  the  moulding  of  Peter. 
But  he  had  set  his  heart  now  on  getting  to  the  very  essentials 
of  this  problem;  he  was  resolved  to  be  blinded  by  no  fair 
appearances,  and  though  these  schools  looked  as  firmly  rooted 
and  stoutly  prosperous  as  British  oaks  and  as  naturally 
grown  as  they,  though  they  had  an  air  of  discharging  a 
function  as  necessary  as  the  beating  of  a  heart  and  as  inevi- 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        261 

tably.  he  still  kept  his  grip  on  the  idea  that  they  were  arti- 
ficial things  of  men's  contriving,  and  still  pressed  his  ques- 
tions: What  are  you  trying  to  do?  What  are  you  doing? 
How  are  you  doing  it?  How  do  you  fit  in  to  the  imperial 
scheme  of  things  ? 

So  challenged  these  various  high  and  head-masters  had 
most  of  them  the  air  of  men  invited  to  talk  of  things  that 
are  easier  to  understand  than  to  say.  They  were  not  at  all 
pompous  about  their  explanations;  from  first  to  last  Oswald 
never  discovered  the  pompous  school-master  of  legend  and 
history ;  without  exception  they  seemed  anxious  to  get  out  of 
their  gowns  and  pose  as  intelligent  laymen  ;  but  they  were  not 
intelligent  laymen,  they  did  not  explain,  they  did  not  explain, 
they  waved  hands  and  smiled.  They  "hoped"  they  were 
"turning  out  clean  English  gentlemen."  They  didn't  train 
their  men  specially  to  any  end  at  all.  The  aim  was  to  de- 
velop a  general  intelligence,  a  general  goodwill. 

"In  relation  to  the  empire  and  its  destiny?"  said  Oswald. 

"I  should  hardly  fix  it  so  definitely  as  that,"  said  Over- 
tone of  Hillborough. 

"But  don't  you  set  before  these  youngsters  some  general 
aim  in  life  to  which  they  are  all  to  contribute?" 

"We  rather  leave  the  sort  of  contribution  to  them,"  said 
Overtone. 

"But  you  must  put  something  before  them  of  where  they 
are,  where  they  are  to  come  in,  what  they  belong  to?"  said 
Oswald. 

"That  lies  in  the  world  about  them,"  said  Overtone. 
"King  and  country — we  don't  need  to  preach  such  things." 

"But  what  the  King  signifies — if  he  signifies  anything  at 
all — and  the  aim  of  the  country,"  urged  Oswald.  "And  the 
Empire!  The  Empire — our  reality.  This  greatness  of  ours 
beyond  the  seas." 

"We  don't  stress  it,"  said  Overtone.  "English  boys  are 
apt  to  be  suspicious  and  ironical.  Have  you  read  that  de- 
lightful account  of  the  patriotic  lecture  in  Stalky  and  Co? 
Oh,  you  should." 

A  common  evasiveness  characterized  all  these  head-masters 
when  Oswald  demanded  the  particulars  of  Peter's  curricu- 
lum. He  wanted  to  know  just  the  subjects  Peter  would 


262  JOAN  AND  PETER 

study  and  which  were  to  be  made  the  most  important,  and 
then  when  these  questions  were  answered  he  would  demand: 
"And  why  do  you  teach  this?  What  is  the  particular  bene- 
fit of  that  to  the  boy  or  the  empire?  How  does  this  other  fit 
into  your  scheme  of  a  clear-minded  man?"  But  it  was  dif- 
ficult to  get  even  the  first  questions  answered  plainly.  From 
the  very  outset  he  found  himself  entangled  in  that  long- 
standing controversy  upon  the  educational  value  of  Latin 
and  Greek.  His  circumstances  and  his  disposition  alike  dis- 
posed him  to  be  sceptical  of  the  value  of  these  shibboleths 
of  the  British  academic  world.  Their  share  in  the  time- 
table was  enormous.  Excellent  gentlemen  who  failed  to 
impress  him  as  either  strong-minded  or  exact,  sought  to  con- 
vince him  of  the  pricelessness  of  Latin  in  strengthening  and 
disciplining  the  mind;  Hinks  of  Carchester,  the  distinguished 
Greek  scholar,  slipped  into  his  hand  at  parting  a  pamphlet 
asserting  that  only  Greek  studies  would  make  a  man  write 
English  beautifully  and  precisely.  Unhappily  for  his  argu- 
ment Hinks  had  written  his  pamphlet  neither  beautifully 
nor  precisely.  Lippick,  irregularly  bald  and  with  neglected 
teeth,  a  man  needlessly  unpleasing  to  the  eye,  descanted  upon 
the  Greek  spirit,  and  its  blend  of  wisdom  and  sensuous 
beauty.  He  quoted  Euripides  at  Oswald  and  breathed  an 
antique  air  in  his  face — although  he  knew  that  Oswald  knew 
practically  no  Greek. 

"Well,"  said  Oswald,  "but  compare  this,"  and  gave  him 
back  three  good  minutes  of  Swahili. 

"But  what  does  it  mean?  It's  gibberish  to  me.  A  cer- 
tain melody  perhaps." 

"In  English,"  Oswald  grinned,  "you  would  lose  it  all. 
It  is  a  passage  of — oh!  quite  fantastic  beauty."  .  .  . 

No  arguments,  no  apologetics,  stayed  the  deepening  of 
Oswald's  conviction  that  education  in  the  public  schools  of 
Great  Britain  was  not  a  forward-going  process  but  a  habit 
and  tradition,  that  these  classical  school-masters  were  saying 
"nothing  like  the  classics"  in  exactly  the  same  spirit  that 
the  cobbler  said  "nothing  like  leather,"  because  it  was  the 
stuff  they  had  in  stock.  These  subjects  were  for  the  most 
part  being  slackly,  tediously,  and  altogether  badly  taught 
to  boys  who  found  no  element  of  interest  in  them,  the  boys 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS         263 

were  as  a  class  acquiring  a  distaste  and  contempt  for  learn- 
ing thus  presented,  and  a  subtle,  wide  demoralization  ensued. 
They  found  a  justification  for  cribs  and  every  possible  device 
for  shirking  work  in  the  utter  remoteness  and  uselessness  of 
these  main  subjects;  the  extravagant  interest  they  took  in 
school  games  was  very  largely  a  direct  consequence  of  their 
intense  boredom  in  school  hours. 

Such  was  the  impression  formed  by  Oswald.  To  his  eyes 
these  great  schools,  architecturally  so  fine,  so  happy  in  their 
out-of-door  aspects,  so  pleasant  socially,  became  more  and 
more  visibly  whirlpools  into  which  the  living  curiosity  and 
happy  energy  of  the  nation 's  youth  were  drawn  and  caught, 
and  fatigued,  thwarted,  and  wasted.  They  were  beautiful 
shelters  of  intellectual  laziness — from  which  Peter  must  if 
possible  be  saved. 

But  how  to  save  him?  There  was,  Oswald  discovered,  no 
saving  him  completely.  Oswald  had  a  profound  hostility 
to  solitary  education.  He  knew  that  except  through  acci- 
dental circumstances  of  the  rarest  sort,  a  private  tutor  must 
necessarily  be  a  poor  thing.  A  man  who  is  cheap  enough  to 
devote  all  his  time  to  the  education  of  one  boy  can  have  very 
little  that  is  worth  imparting.  And  education  is  socializa- 
tion. Education  is  the  process  of  making  the  unsocial  indi- 
vidual a  citizen.  .  .  . 

Oswald's  decision  upon  Caxton  in  the  end,  was  by  no  means 
a  certificate  of  perfection  for  Caxton.  But  Caxton  had  a 
good  if  lopsided  Modern  Side,  with  big,  business-like  chemical 
and  physical  laboratories,  a  quite  honest  and  living-looking 
biological  and  geological  museum,  and  a  pleasant  and  active 
layman  as  headmaster.  The  mathematical  teaching  instead 
of  being  a  drill  in  examination  solutions  \vas  carried  on  in 
connexion  with  work  in  the  physical  and  engineering  labora- 
tories. It  was  true  that  the  "Modern  Side"  of  Caxton 
taught  no  history  of  any  sort,  ignored  logic  and  philosophy, 
and,  in  the  severity  of  its  modernity,  excluded  even  that 
amount  of  Latin  which  is  needed  for  a  complete  mastery  of 
English ;  nevertheless  it  did  manifestly  interest  its  boys 
enough  to  put  games  into  a  secondary  place.  At  Caxton  one 
did  not  see  boys  playing  games  as  old  ladies  in  hydropaths 
play  patience,  desperately  and  excessively  and  with  a  forced 


264  JOAN  AND  PETER 

enthusiasm,  because  they  had  nothing  better  to  do.  Even 
the  Caxton  school  magazine  did  not  give  much  more  than  two- 
thirds  of  its  space  to  games.  So  to  Caxton  Peter  went,  when 
Mr.  Mackinder  of  White  Court  had  done  his  duty  by  him. 

§  4 

Mr.  Henderson,  the  creator  of  Caxton,  was  of  the  large 
sized  variety  of  schoolmaster,  rather  round-shouldered  and 
with  a  slightly  persecuted  bearing  towards  parents;  his  mirid 
seemed  busy  with  many  things — buildings,  extensions,  gov- 
ernors, chapels.  Oswald  walked  with  him  through  a  field 
that  was  visibly  becoming  a  botanical  garden,  towards  the 
school  playing-fields.  Once  the  schoolmaster  stopped,  his 
mind  distressed  by  a  sudden  intrusive  doubt  whether  the  ex- 
actly right  place  had  been  chosen  for  what  he  called  a  "bi- 
ological pond."  He  had  to  ask  various  questions  of  a  gar- 
dener and  give  certain  directions.  But  he  was  listening  to 
Oswald,  nevertheless. 

Oswald  discoursed  upon  the  training  of  what  he  called 
"the  fortunate  Elite."  "We  can't  properly  educate  the 
whole  of  our  community  yet,  perhaps,"  he  said,  "but  at  least 
these  expensive  boys  of  ours  ought  to  be  given  everything 
we  can  possibly  give  them.  It's  to  them  and  their  class  the 
Empire  will  look.  Naturally.  We  ought  to  turn  out  boys 
who  know  where  they  are  in  the  world,  what  the  empire  is 
and  what  it  aims  to  do,  who  understand  something  of  their 
responsibilities  to  Asia  and  Africa  and  have  a  philosophy  of 
life  and  duty.  ..." 

"More  of  that  sort  of  thing  is  done,"  said  Mr.  Henderson, 
"than  outsiders  suppose.  Masters  talk  to  boys.  Lend  them 
books." 

"In  an  incidental  sort  of  way,"  said  Oswald.  "But  three- 
quarters  of  the  boys  you  miss.  .  .  .  Even  here,  it  seems,  you 
must  still  have  your  classical  side.  You  must  still  keep  on 
with  Latin  and  Greek,  with  courses  that  will  never  reach 
through  the  dull  grind  to  the  stale  old  culture  beyond.  Why 
not  drop  all  that?  Why  not  be  modern  outright,  and  leave 
Eton  and  Harrow  and  Winchester  and  Westminster  to  go  the 
old  ways?  Why  not  teach  modern  history  and  modern  phi- 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        265 

losophy  in  plain  English  here  ?  Why  not  question  the  world 
we  see,  instead  of  the  world  of  those  dead  Levantines  ?  Why 
not  be  a  modern  school  altogether?" 

The  headmaster  seemed  to  consider  that  idea.  But  there 
were  the  gravest  of  practical  objections. 

"We'd  get  no  scholarships,"  he  considered.  "Our  boys 
would  stop  at  a  dead  end.  They'd  get  no  appointments. 
They'd  be  dreadfully  handicapped.  .  .  . 

"We're  not  a  complete  system,"  said  Mr.  Henderson. 
"No.  We're  only  part  of  a  big  circle.  We've  got  to  take 
what  the  parents  send  on  to  us  and  we've  got  to  send  them 
on  to  college  or  the  professions  or  what  not.  It's  only  part 
of  a  process  here — only  part  of  a  process."  .  .  . 

Just  as  the  ultimate  excuse  of  the  private  schoolmasters 
had  been  that  they  could  do  no  more  than  prepare  along  the 
lines  dictated  for  them  by  the  public  school,  so  the  public 
school  waved  Oswald  on  to  the  university.  Thus  he  came 
presently  with  his  questions  to  the  university,  to  Oxford  and 
Cambridge,  for  it  was  clear  these  set  the  pattern  of  all  the 
rest  in  England.  He  came  to  Oxford  and  Cambridge  as  he 
came  to  the  public  schools,  it  must  be  remembered,  with  a 
fresh  mind,  for  the  navy  had  snatched  him  straight  out  of  his 
preparatory  school  away  from  the  ordinary  routines  of  an 
English  education  at  the  tender  age  of  thirteen. 

§  5 

Oswald's  investigation  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge  began 
even  before  Peter  had  entered  School  House  at  Caxton.  As 
early  as  the  spring  of  1906,  the  scarred  face  under  the  soft 
felt  hat  was  to  be  seen  projecting  irom  one  of  those  brown- 
coloured  hansom  cabs  that  used  to  ply  in  Cambridge.  His 
bag  was  on  the  top  and  he  was  going  to  the  University  Arms 
to  instal  himself  and  have  "a  good  look  round  the  damned 
place."  At  times  there  still  hung  about  Oswald  a  faint 
flavour  of  the  midshipman  on  leave  in  a  foreign  town. 

He  spent  three  days  watching  undergraduates,  he  prowled 
about  the  streets,  and  with  his  face  a  little  on  one  side, 
brought  his  red-brown  eye  to  bear  on  the  books  in  bookshop 
windows  and  the  display  of  socks  and  ties  and  handkerchiefs 


266  JOAN  AND  PETER 

in  the  outfitters.  In  those  years  the  chromatic  sock  was  just 
dawning  upon  the  adolescent  mind,  it  had  still  to  achieve  the 
iridescent  glories  of  its  crowning  years.  But  Oswald  found 
it  symptomatic;  ex  pede  Uerculem.  lie  was  to  be  seen  sur- 
veying the  Backs,  and  standing  about  among  the  bookstalls  in 
the  Market  Place.  He  paddled  a  Canadian  canoe  to  Byron's 
pool,  and  watched  a  cheerful  group  dispose  of  a  huge  tea  in 
the  garden  of  the  inn  close  at  hand.  They  seemed  to  joke  for 
his  benefit,  neat  rather  than  merry  jesting.  So  that  was 
Cambridge,  was  it?  Then  he  went  on  by  a  tedious  cross- 
country journey  to  the  slack  horrors  of  one  of  the  Oxford 
hotels,  and  made  a  similar  preliminary  survey  of  the  land 
here  that  he  proposed  to  prospect.  There  seemed  to  be  more 
rubbish  and  more  remainders  in  the  Oxford  secondhand 
bookshops  and  less  comfort  in  the  hotels ;  the  place  was  more 
self-consciously  picturesque,  there  was  less  of  Diana  and 
more  of  Venus  about  its  beauty,  a  rather  blowsy  Gothic 
Venus  with  a  bad  tooth  or  so.  So  it  impressed  Oswald.  The 
glamour  of  Oxford,  sunrise  upon  Magdalen  tower,  Oriel, 
Pater,  and  so  forth,  were  lost  upon  Oswald's  toughened  mind ; 
he  had  spent  his  susceptible  adolescence  on  a  battleship,  and 
the  sunblaze  of  Africa  had  given  him  a  taste  for  colour  like 
a  taste  for  raw  rye  whiskey.  .  .  . 

He  walked  about  the  perfect  garden  of  St.  Giles'  College 
and  beat  at  the  head  of  Blepp,  the  senior  tutor,  whose  ac- 
quaintance he  had  made  in  the  Athenaeum,  with  his  stock 
questions.  The  garden  of  St.  Giles'  College  is  as  delicate  as 
fine  linen  in  lavender;  its  turf  is  supposed  to  make  American 
visitors  regret  the  ancestral  trip  in  the  Mayflower  very  bit- 
terly; Blepp  had  fancied  that  in  a  way  it  answered  Oswald. 
But  Oswald  turned  his  glass  eye  and  his  ugly  side  to  the 
garden,  it  might  just  as  well  have  not  been  there,  and  kept 
to  his  questioning;  "What  are  we  making  of  our  boys  here? 
What  are  they  going  to  make  of  the  Empire?  What  are  you 
teaching  them?  What  are  you  not  teaching  them?  How 
are  you  working  them?  And  why?  Why?  What's  the 
idea  of  it  all?  Suppose  presently  when  this  fine  October  in 
history  ends,  that  the  weather  of  the  world  breaks  up;  what 
will  you  have  ready  for  the  storm?" 

Blepp  felt  the  ungraciousness  of  such  behaviour  acutely. 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        267 

It  was  like  suddenly  asking  the  host  of  some  great  beautiful 
dinner-party  whether  he  earned  his  income  honestly.  Like 
shouting  it  up  the  table  at  him.  But  Oswald  was  almost  as 
comfortable  a  guest  for  a  don  to  entertain  as  a  spur  in  one 's 
trouser  pocket.  Blepp  did  his  best  to  temper  the  occasion 
by  an  elaborate  sweet  reasonableness. 

"Don't  you  think  there's  something  in  our  atmosphere?" 
he  began. 

"I  don't  like  your  atmosphere.  The  Oxford  shops  seem 
grubby  little  shops.  The  streets  are  narrow  and  badly 
lit." 

"I  wasn't  thinking  of  the  shops." 

"It's  where  the  youngsters  buy  their  stuff,  their  furniture, 
and  as  far  as  I  can  see,  most  of  their  ideas." 

' '  You  '11  be  in  sympathy  with  the  American  lady  who  com- 
plained the  other  day  about  our  want  of  bathrooms, ' '  Blepp 
sneered. 

"Well,  why  not?"  said  Oswald  outrageously. 

Blepp  shrugged  his  shoulders  and  looked  for  sympathy  at 
the  twisted  brick  chimneys  of  St.  Giles'. 

Oswald  became  jerkily  eloquent.  "We've  got  an  empire 
sprawling  all  over  the  world.  We're  a  people  at  grips  with 
all  mankind.  And  in  a  few  years  these  few  thousand  men 
here  and  at  Cambridge  and  a  few  thousand  in  the  other  uni- 
versities, have  practically  to  be  the  mind  of  the  empire. 
Think  of  the  problems  that  press  upon  us  as  an  empire. 
All  the  nations  sharpen  themselves  now  like  knives.  Are 
we  making  the  mentality  to  solve  the  Irish  riddle  here? 
Are  we  preparing  any  outlook  for  India  here?  What  are 
you  doing  here  to  get  ready  for  such  tasks  as  these  ? ' ' 

"How  can  I  show  you  the  realities  that  go  on  beneath  the 
surface?"  said  Blepp.  "You  don't  see  what  is  brewing  to- 
day, the  talk  that  goes  on  in  the  men's  rooms,  the  mutual 
polishing  of  minds.  Look  not  at  our  formal  life  but  our  in- 
formal life.  Consider  one  college,  consider  for  example 
Balliol.  Think  of  the  Jowett  influence,  the  Milner  group — 
not  blind  to  the  empire  there,  were  we?  Even  that  fellow 
Belloc.  A  saucy  rogue,  but  good  rich  stuff.  All  out  of  just 
one  college.  These  are  things  one  cannot  put  in  a  syllabus. 
These  are  things  that  defeat  statistics." 


268  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"But  that  is  no  reason  why  you  should  put  chaff  and  dry 
bones  into  the  syllabus, ' '  said  Oswald.  .  .  . 

"This  place,"  said  Oswald,  and  waved  his  arm  at  the 
great  serenity  of  St.  Giles',  "it  has  the  air  of  a  cathedral 
close.  It  might  be  a  beautiful  place  of  .retirement  for  sad 
and  weary  old  men.  It  seems  a  thousand  miles  from  ma- 
chinery, from  great  towns  and  the  work  of  the  world. ' ' 

"Would  you  have  us  teach  in  a  foundry?" 

"I'd  have  you  teaching  something  about  the  storm  that 
seems  to  me  to  be  gathering  in  the  world  of  labour.  These 
youngsters  here  are  going  to  be  the  statesmen,  the  writers  and 
teachers,  the  lawyers,  the  high  officials,  the  big  employers, 
of  tomorrow.  But  all  that  world  of  industry  they  have  to 
control  seems  as  far  oft'  here  as  if  it  were  on  another  planet. 
You're  not  talking  about  it,  you're  not  thinking  about  it. 
You're  teaching  about  the  Gracchi  and  the  Greek  fig  trade. 
You're  magnifying  that  pompous  bore  Cicero  and  minimi/ing 
— old  Salisbury  for  example — who  was  a  far  more  important 
figure  in  history — a  greater  man  in  a  greater  world." 

"With  all  respect  to  his  memory,"  said  Blepp,  "but  good 
Lord!" 

"Much  greater.  Your  classics  put  out  your  perspective. 
Dozens  of  living  statesmen  are  greater  than  Cicero.  Of 
course  our  moderns  are  greater.  If  only  because  of  the  great- 
ness of  our  horizons.  Oxford  and  Cambridge  ought  to  be  the 
learning  and  thinking  part  of  the  whole  empire,  twin  hemi- 
spheres in  the  imperial  brain.  But  when  I  think  of  the  si/e 
of  the  imperial  body,  its  hundreds  of  nations,  its  thousands 
of  cities,  its  tribes,  its  vast  extension  round  and  about  the 
world,  the  immense  problem  of  it,  and  then  of  the  size  and 
quality  of  this,  I'm  reminded  of  the  Atlantosaurus.  You've 
heard  of  the  beast?  Its  brain  was  smaller  than  the  ganglia 
of  its  rump.  No  doubt  its  brain  thought  itself  quite  up  to 
its  job.  It  wasn't.  Something  ate  up  the  Atlantosaurus. 
These  two  places,  this  place,  ought  to  be  big  enough,  and 
bigly  conceived  enough,  to  irradiate  our  whole  world  with 
ideas.  All  the  empire.  They  ought  to  dominate  the  minds 
of  hundreds  of  millions  of  men.  And  they  dominate  noth- 
ing. Leave  India  and  Africa  out  of  it.  They  do  not  even 
dominate  England.  Think  only  of  your  labour  at  home,  of 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        269 

that  huge  blind  Titan,  whom  you  won't  understand,  which 
doesn't  understand  you " 

"There  again,"  interrupted  Blepp  sharply,  "you  are  sim- 
ply ignorant  of  what  is  going  on  here.  Because  Oxford  has 
a  certain  traditional  beauty  and  a  decent  respect  for  the  past, 
because  it  doesn't  pose  and  assert  itself  rawly,  you  are  of- 
fended. You  do  not  realize  how  active  we  can  be,  how  up- 
to-date  we  are.  It  wouldn't  make  us  more  modern  in  spirit 
if  we  lived  in  enamelled  bathrooms  and  lectured  in  corru- 
gated iron  sheds.  That  isn't  modernity.  That's  your  mis- 
take. In  respect  to  this  very  question  of  labour,  we  have 
got  our  labour  contact.  Have  you  never  heard  of  Ruskin 
College?  Founded  here  by  an  American  of  the  most  modern 
type,  one  Vrooman."  He  repeated  the  name  "Vrooman," 
not  as  though  he  loved  it  but  as  though  he  thought  it  ought 
to  appeal  to  Oswald.  "I  think  he  came  from  Chicago." 
Surely  a  Teutonic  name  from  Chicago  was  modern  enough 
to  satisfy  any  one!  "It  is  a  college  of  real  working-men,  of 
the  Trade  Union  leader  type,  the  actual  horny-handed  article, 
who  come  up  here — I  suppose  because  they  don't  agree  with 
your  idea  that  we  deal  only  in  the  swathings  of  mummies. 
They  at  any  rate  think  that  we  have  something  to  tell  the 
modern  world,  something  worth  their  learning.  Perhaps 
they  know  their  needs  better  than  you  do. ' ' 

Oswald  was  momentarily  abashed.  He  expressed  a  desire 
to  visit  this  Ruskin  College. 

BJepp  explained  he  was  not  himself  connected  with  the 
college.  "Not  quite  my  line,"  said  Blepp  parenthetically; 
but  he  could  arrange  for  a  visit  under  proper  guidance,  and 
presently  under  the  wing  of  a  don  of  radical  tendencies  Os- 
wald went. 

It  seemed  to  him  the  most  touching  and  illuminating  thing 
in  Oxford.  It  reminded  him  of  Jude  1he  Obscure. 

Ruskin  College  was  sheltered  over  some  stables  in  a  back 
street,  and  it  displayed  a  small  group  of  oldish  young  men, 
for  the  most  part  with  north-country  accents,  engaged  in 
living  under  austere  circumstances — they  paid  scarcely  any- 
thing and  did  all  the  housework — and  doing  their  best  to  get 
hold  of  the  precious  treasure  of  knowledge  and  understand- 
ing they  were  persuaded  Oxford  possessed.  They  had  come 


270  JOAN  AND  PETER 

up  011  their  savings  by  virtue  of  extraordinary  sacrifices. 
Graduation  in  any  oi'  the  Oxford  schools  was  manifestly  im- 
possible to  them,  if  only  on  account  of  the  Greek  bar;  the 
university  had  no  use  for  these  respectful  pilgrims  and  no 
intention  of  encouraging  more  of  them,  and  the  "principal," 
Mr.  Dennis  llird,  in  the  teeth  of  much  opposition,  was  vamp- 
ing a  sort  of  course  for  them  with  the  aid  of  a  few  liberal- 
minded  junior  dons  who  delivered  a  lecture  when  their  proper 
engagements  permitted.  There  was  a  vague  suggestion  of 
perplexity  in  the  conversation  of  the  two  students  with  whom 
Oswald  talked.  This  tepid  drip  of  disconnected  instruction 
wasn't  what  they  had  expected,  but  then,  what  had  they  ex- 
pected? Vrooman,  the  idealist  who  had  set  the  thing  going, 
had  returned  to  America  leaving  much  to  be  explained. 
Oswald  dined  with  Blepp  at  St.  Osyth's  that  night,  and 
spoke  over  the  port  in  the  common  room  of  these  working 
men  who  were  "dunning  Oxford  for  wisdom." 

Jarlow,  the  wit  of  the  college,  who  had  been  entertaining 
the  company  with  the  last  half-dozen  Spoonerisms  he  had  in- 
vented, was  at  once  reminded  of  a  little  poem  he  had  made, 
and  he  recited  it.  It  was  supposed  to  be  by  one  of  these 
same  Ruskin  College  men,  and  his  artless  rhyming  of  "Socra- 
tes" and  "fates"  and  "sides"  and  "Euripides,"  combined 
with  a  sort  of  modest  pretentiousness  of  thought  and  inten- 
tion, was  very  laughable  indeed.  Everybody  laughed  mer- 
rily except  Oswald. 

"That's  quite  one  of  your  best,  Jarlow,"  said  Blepp. 

But  Oxford  had  been  rubbing  Oswald's  fur  backwards 
that  day.  The  common  room  became  aware  of  him  sitting 
up  stiffly  and  regarding  Jarlow  with  an  evil  expression. 

"Why  the  Devil,"  said  Oswald,  addressing  himself  point- 
edly and  querulously  to  Jarlow,  "shouldn't  a  working-man 
say  'So-cratesf  We  all  say  'Paris.'  These  men  do  Oxford 
too  much  honour." 

§  6 

Perhaps  there  was  a  sort  of  necessity  in  the  educational 
stagnation  of  England  during  those  crucial  years  before  the 
Great  War.  All  the  influential  and  important  people  of  the 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS         271 

country  were  having  a  thoroughly  good  time,  and  if  there 
was  a  growing  quarrel  between  worker  and  employer  no 
one  saw  any  reason  in  that  for  sticking  a  goad  into  the 
teacher.  The  disposition  of  the  mass  of  men  is  always  on 
the  side  of  custom  against  innovation.  The  clear-headed  ef- 
fort of  yesterday  tends  always  to  become  the  unintelligent 
routine  of  tomorrow.  So  long  as  we  get  along  we  go  along. 
In  the  less  exacting  days  of  good  Queen  Victoria  the  educa- 
tional processes  of  Great  Britain  had  served  well  enough; 
they  still  went  on  because  the  necessity  for  a  more  thorough, 
coherent,  and  lucid  education  had  still  to  be  made  glaringly 
manifest.  Few  people  understood  the  discontent  of  a  Ray 
Lankester,  the  fretfulness  of  a  Kipling.  Foresight  dies  when 
the  imagination  slumbers.  Only  catastrophe  can  convince 
the  mass  of  people  of  the  possibility  of  catastrophe.  The 
system  had  the  inertia  of  a  spinning  top.  The  most  thor- 
oughly and  completely  mis-taught  of  one  generation  became 
the  mis-teachers  of  the  next.  "Learn,  obey,  create  nothing, 
initiate  nothing,  have  no  troublesome  doubts,"  ran  the  rules 
of  scholarly  discretion.  "Prize-boy,  scholar,  fellow,  don, 
pedagogue;  prize-boy,  scholar,  fellow,  don" — so  spun  the 
circle  of  the  schools.  Into  that  relentless  circle  the  bright, 
curious  little  Peters,  who  wanted  to  know  about  the  insides  of 
animals  and  the  way  of  machines  and  what  was  happening, 
were  drawn;  the  little  Joans,  too,  were  being  drawn.  The 
best  escaped  complete  deadening,  they  found  a  use  for  them- 
selves, but  life  usually  kept  them  too  busy  and  used  them 
too  hard  for  them  ever  to  return  to  teach  in  college  or  school 
of  the  realities  they  had  experienced.  And  so  as  Joan  and 
Peter  grew  up,  Oswald  became  more  and  more  tolerant  of  a 
certain  rabble  rout  of  inky  outsiders  who,  without  authority 
and  dignity,  were  at  least  putting  living  ideas  of  social  func- 
tion and  relationship  in  the  way  of  adolescent  enquiry. 

It  became  manifest  to  Oswald  that  the  real  work  of  higher 
education,  the  discussion  of  God,  of  the  state  and  of  sex,  of 
all  the  great  issues  in  life,  while  it  was  being  elaborately 
evaded  in  the  formal  education  of  the  country,  was  to  a 
certain  extent  being  done,  thinly,  unsatisfactorily,  pervert- 
edly  even  by  the  talk  of  boj*s  and  girls  among  themselves, 
by  the  casual  suggestions  of  tutors,  friends,  and  chance  ac- 


272  JOAN  AND  PETER 

quaintanees,  and  more  particularly  by  a  number  of  irre- 
sponsible journalists  and  literary  men.  For  example  though 
the  higher  education  of  the  country  afforded  no  compre- 
hensive view  of  social  inter-relationship  at  all,  the  propa- 
ganda of  the  socialists  did  give  a  scheme — Oswald  thought  it 
was  a  mistaken  and  wrong-headed  scheme — of  economic  in- 
terdependence. If  the  school  showed  nothing  to  their  chil- 
dren of  the  Empire  but  a  few  tiresome  maps,  Kipling's 
stories,  for  all  his  Jingo  violence,  did  at  least  breathe  some- 
thing of  its  living  spirit.  As  Joan  and  Peter  grew  up  they 
ferreted  out  and  brought  to  their  guardian's  knowledge  a 
school  of  irresponsible  contemporary  teachers,  Shaw,  Wells 
and  the  other  Fabian  Society  pamphleteers,  the  Belloc-Ches- 
terton  group,  Cuuninghame  Graham,  Edward  Carpenter, 
Orage  of  The  New  Age,  Galsworthy,  Cannan ;  the  suffragettes, 
and  the  like.  If  the  formal  teachers  lacked  boldness  these 
strange  self-appointed  instructors  seemed  to  be  nothing  if 
not  bold.  The  Freewoman,  which  died  to  rise  again  as  The 
New  Freewoman,  existed  it  seemed  chiefly  to  mention  every- 
thing that  a  young  lady  should  never  dream  of  mentioning. 
Aunt  Phoebe's  monthly,  Wayleaves,  in  its  green  and  purple 
cover,  made  a  gallant  effort  to  outdo  that  valiant  weekly. 
Aunt  Phoebe  was  a  bright  and  irresponsible  assistant  in  the 
education  of  Oswald's  wards.  She  sowed  the  house  with 
strange  books  whenever  she  came  to  stay  with  them.  Oswald 
found  Joan  reading  Oscar  "Wilde  when  she  was  seventeen. 
He  did  not  interrupt  her  reading,  for  he  could  not  imagine 
how  to  set  about  the  interruption.  Later  on  he  discovered  a 
most  extraordinary  volume  by  Havelock  Ellis  lying  in  the 
library,  an  impossible  volume.  He  read  in  it  a  little  and  then 
put  it  down.  Afterwards  he  could  not  believe  that  book 
existed.  He  thought  he  must  have  dreamt  about  it,  or 
dreamt  the  contents  into  it.  It  seemed  incredible  that  Aunt 

Phrebe !  .  .  .  He  was  never  quite  sure.     When  he  went 

to  look  for  it  again  it  had  vanished,  and  he  did  not  like  to 
ask  for  it. 

More  and  more  did  this  outside  supplement  of  education 
in  England  press  upon  Oswald's  reluctant  attention.  Most 
of  these  irregulars  he  disliked  by  nature  and  tradition.  None 
of  them  had  the  dignity  and  restraint  of  the  great  Victorians, 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        273 

the  Corinthian  elegance  of  Ruskin,  the  Teutonic  hammer- 
blows  of  Carlyle.  Shaw  he  understood  was  a  lean,  red- 
haired  Pantaloon,  terribly  garrulous  and  vain;  Belloc  and 
Chesterton  thrust  a  shameless  obesity  upon  the  public  atten- 
tion; the  social  origins  of  most  of  the  crew  were  appalling, 
Bennett  was  a  solicitor's  clerk  from  the  potteries,  Wells  a 
counter-jumper,  Orage  came  from  Leeds.  Oswald  had  seen 
a  picture  of  Wells  by  Max  that  confirmed  his  worst  suspi- 
cions about  these  people;  a  heavy  bang  of  hair  assisted  a 
cascade  moustache  to  veil  a  pasty  face  that  was  broad  rather 
than  long  and  with  a  sly,  conceited  expression;  the  creature 
still  wore  a  long  and  crumpled  frock  coat,  acquired  no  doubt 
during  his  commercial  phase,  and  rubbed  together  two  large, 
clammy,  white,  misshapen  hands.  Except  for  Cunuinghame 
Graham  there  was  not  a  gentleman,  as  Oswald  understood  the 
word,  among  them  all.  But  these  writers  got  hold  of  the  in- 
telligent young  because  they  did  at  least  write  freely  where 
the  university  teacher  feared  to  tread.  They  wrote,  he 
thought,  without  any  decent  restraint.  They  seasoned  even 
wholesome  suggestions  with  a  flavour  of  scandalous  excite- 
ment. It  remained  an  open  question  in  his  mind  whether 
they  did  more  good  by  making  young  people  think  or  more 
harm  by  making  them  think  wrong.  Progressive  dons  he 
found  maintained  the  former  opinion.  With  that  support 
Oswald  was  able  to  follow  his  natural  disposition  and  leave 
the  reading  of  his  two  wards  unrestrained. 

And  they  read — and  thought,  to  such  purpose  as  will  be 
presently  told. 

§  7 

But  here  Justice  demands  an  interlude. 

Before  we  go  on  to  tell  of  how  Joan  and  Peter  grew  up 
to  adolescence  in  these  schools  that  Oswald — assisted  by  Aunt 
Phyllis  in  the  case  of  Joan — found  for  them,  Mr.  Mackin- 
der  must  have  his  say,  and  make  the  Apology  of  the  School- 
master. He  made  it  to  Oswald  when  first  Oswald  visited 
him  and  chose  his  school  out  of  all  the  other  preparatory 
schools,  to  be  Peter's.  He  appeared  as  a  little  brown  man 
with  a  hedgehog's  nose  and  much  of  the  hedgehog's  indig- 


274  JOAN  AND  PETER 

nant  note  in  his  voice.  He  came,  shy  and  hostile,  into  the 
drawing-room  in  which  Oswald  awaited  him.  It  was,  by 
the  by,  the  most  drawing-room-like  drawing-room  that  Os- 
wald had  ever  been  in ;  it  was  as  if  some  one  had  said  to  a 
furniture  dealer,  ' '  People  expect  me  to  have  a  drawing-room. 
Please  let  me  have  exactly  the  sort  of  drawing-room  that  peo- 
ple expect."  It  displayed  a  grand  piano  towards  the  French 
window,  a  large  standard  lamp  with  an  enormous  shade, 
a  pale  silk  sofa,  an  Ottoman,  a  big  fern  in  an  ornate  pot, 
and  water-colours  of  Venetian  lagoons.  In  the  midst  of  it 
all  stood  Mr.  Mackinder,  in  a  highly  contracted  state,  mutely 
radiating  an  interrogative  ' '  Well  ? ' ' 

"I'm  looking  for  a  school  for  my  nephew,"  said  Oswald. 

"You  want  him  here?" 

"Well —  Do  you  mind  if  first  of  all  I  see  something  of 
the  school?" 

"We're  always  open  to  investigation,"  said  Mr.  Mackiri- 
der,  bitterly. 

"I  want  to  do  the  very  best  I  can  for  this  boy.  I  feel 
very  strongly  that  it's  my  duty  to  him  and  the  country  to 
turn  him  out — as  well  as  a  boy  can  be  turned  out. ' ' 

Mr.  Mackinder  nodded  his  head  and  continued  to  listen. 

This  was  something  new  in  private  schoolmasters.  For  the 
most  part  they  had  opened  themselves  out  to  Oswald,  like 
sunflowers,  like  the  receptive  throats  of  nestlings.  They  had 
embraced  and  silenced  him  by  the  wealth  of  their  assurances. 

"I  have  two  little  wards,"  he  said.  "A  boy  and  a  girl. 
I  want  to  make  all  I  can  of  them.  They  ought  to  belong  to 
the  Elite.  The  strength  of  a  country — of  an  empire — de- 
pends ultimately  almost  entirely  on  its  Elite.  This  empire 
isn't  overwhelmed  with  intelligence,  and  most  of  the  talk  we 
hear  about  the  tradition  of  statesmanship 

Mr.  Mackinder  made  a  short  snorting  noise  through  his 
nose  that  seemed  to  indicate  his  opinion  of  contemporary 
statesmanship. 

"You  see  I  take  this  schooling  business  very  solemnly. 
These  upper-class  schools,  I  say,  these  schools  for  the  sons 
of  prosperous  people  and  scholarship  winners,  are  really 
Elite-making  machines.  They  really  make — or  fail  to  make 
— the  Empire.  That  makes  me  go  about  asking  schoolmas- 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS         275 

ters  a  string  of  questions.  Some  of  them  don't  like  my  ques- 
tions. Perhaps  they  are  too  elementary.  I  ask :  what  is  this 
education  of  yours  up  to  ?  What  is  the  design  of  the  whole  ? 
What  is  this  preparation  of  yours  for?  This  is  called  a 
Preparatory  School.  You  lay  the  foundations.  What  is  the 
design  of  the  building  for  which  these  foundations  are  laid  ? ' ' 

He  paused,  determined  to  make  Mr.  Mackinder  say  some- 
thing before  he  discoursed  further. 

"It  isn't  so  simple  as  that,"  was  wrung  from  Mr.  Mackin- 
der. "Suppose  we  just  walk  round  the  school.  Suppose  we 
just  see  the  sort  of  place  it  is  and  what  we  are  doing  here. 
Then  perhaps  you'll  be  able  to  see  better  what  we  contribute 
— in  the  way  of  making  a  citizen." 

The  inspection  was  an  unusually  satisfactory  one.  White 
Court  was  one  of  the  few  private  schools  Oswald  had  seen 
that  had  been  built  expressly  for  its  purpose.  Its  class  rooms 
were  well  lit  and  well  arranged,  its  little  science  museum 
seemed  good  and  well  arranged  and  well  provided  with  dia- 
grams ;  its  gymnasium  was  businesslike ;  its  wall  blackboards 
unusually  abundant  and  generously  used,  and  everything  was 
tidy.  Nevertheless  the  Catechism  for  Schoolmasters  was  not 
spared.  "Now,"  said  Oswald,  "now  for  the  curriculum?" 

"We  live  in  the  same  world  with  most  other  English 
schools,"  Mr.  Mackinder  sulked.  "This  is  a  preparatory 
school." 

"What  are  called  English  subjects?" 

"Yes." 

"How  do  you  teach  geography?" 

"With  books  and  maps." 

Oswald  spoke  of  lantern  slides  and  museum  visits.  The 
cinema  had  yet  to  become  an  educational  possibility. 

"  I  do  what  I  can, ' '  said  Mr.  Mackinder ;  "  I  'm  not  a  mil- 
lionaire." 

' '  Do  you  do  classics  ? ' ' 

"We  do  Latin.  Clever  boys  do  a  little  Greek.  In  prepa- 
ration for  the  public  schools." 

"Grammar  of  course?  .  .  . 

"What  else?  .  .  . 

"French,  German,  Latin,  Greek,  bits  of  mathematics, 
botany,  geography,  bits  of  history,  book-keeping,  music  les- 


276  JOAN  AND  PETER 

sons,  some  water-colour  painting;  it's  very  mixed,"  said 
Oswald. 

"It's  miscellaneous." 

Mr.  Mackinder  roused  himself  to  a  word  of  defence :  ' '  The 
boys  don't  specialize." 

"But  this  is  a  diet  of  scraps,"  said  Oswald,  reviving  one 
of  the  most  controversial  topics  of  the  catechism.  "Nothing 
can  be  done  thoroughly." 

"We  are  necessarily  elementary." 

"It's  rather  like  the  White  Knight  in  Alice  in  Wonder- 
land packing  his  luggage  for  nowhere." 

"We  have  to  teach  what  is  required  of  us,"  said  Mr. 
Mackinder. 

"But  what  is  education  up  to?"  asked  Oswald. 

As  Mr.  Mackinder  offered  no  answer  to  that  riddle,  Oswald 
went  on.  "What  is  Education  in  England  up  to,  anyhow? 
In  Uganda  we  knew  what  we  were  doing.  There  was  an 
idea  in  it.  The  old  native  tradition  was  breaking  up.  We 
taught  them  to  count  and  reckon  English  fashion,  to  read 
and  write,  we  gave  them  books  and  the  Christian  elements, 
so  that  they  could  join  on  to  our  civilization  and  play  a  part 
in  the  .great  world  that  was  breaking  up  their  little  world. 
We  didn't  teach  them  anything  that  didn't  serve  mind  or 
soul  or  body.  We  saw  the  end  of  what  we  were  doing.  But 
half  this  school  teaching  of  yours  is  like  teaching  in  a  dream. 
You  don't  teach  the  boy  what  he  wants  to  know  and  needs 
to  know..  You  spend  half  his  time  on  calculations  he  has 
no  use  for,  mere  formal  calculations,  and  on  this  dead  lan- 
guage stuff !  It's  like  trying  to  graft  mummy  steak  on 

living  flesh.  It's  like  boiling  fossils  for  soup." 

Mr.  Mackinder  said  nothing. 

"And  damn  it!"  said  Oswald  petulantly;  "your  school  is 
about  as  good  a  school  as  I've  seen  or  am  likely  to  see.  .  .  . 

"I  had  an  idea,"  he  went  on,  "of  just  getting  the  very 
best  out  of  those  two  youngsters — the  boy  especially — of  mak- 
ing every  hour  of  his  school  work  a  gift  of  so  much  power  or 
skill  or  subtlety,  of  opening  the  world  to  him  like  a  magic 
book.  .  .  .  The  boy's  tugging  at  the  magic  covers.  ..." 

He  stopped  short. 

"There  are  no  such  schools,"  said  Mr.  Mackinder  com- 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        277 

pactly.     "This   is    as    good    a   school    as   you    will   find." 

Arid  there  he  left  the  matter  for  the  time.  But  in  the 
evening  he  dined  with  Oswald  at  his  hotel,  and  it  may  be 
that  iced  champagne  had  something  to  do  with  a  certain  re- 
laxation from  his  afternoon  restraint.  Oswald  had  already 
arranged  about  Peter,  but  he  wanted  the  little  man  to  talk 
more.  So  he  set  him  an  example.  He  talked  of  his  own. 
life.  He  represented  it  as  a  life  of  disappointment  and 
futility.  "1  envy  you  your  life  of  steadfast  usefulness." 
He  spoke  of  his  truncated  naval  career  and  his  disfigurement. 
Of  the  years  of  uncertainty  that  had  followed.  He  talked 
of  the  ambitions  and  achievements  of  other  men,  of  the  large 
hopes  and  ambitions  of  youth. 

"1  too,"  said  Mr.  Mackinder,  warming  for  a  moment,  and 
then  left  his  sentence  unfinished.  Oswald  continued  to  gen- 
eralixe.  .  .  . 

"All  life,  I  suppose,  is  disappointment — is  anyhow  largely 
disappointment,"  said  Mr.  Mackinder  presently. 

"We  get  something  done." 

"Five  per  cent.,  ten  per  cent.,  of  what  we  meant  to  do." 

The  schoolmaster  reflected.  Oswald  refilled  his  glass  for 
him. 

"To  begin  with  I  thought,  none  of  these  other  fellows 
really  know  how  to  run  a  school.  I  will,  I  said,  make  a  nest 
of  Young  Paragons.  I  will  take  a  bunch  of  boys  and  get 
the  best  out  of  them,  the  best  possible;  watch  them,  study 
them,  foster  them,  make  a  sort  of  boy  so  that  the  White 
Court  brand  shall  be  looked  for  and  recognized.  ..." 

He  sipped  his  faintly  seething  wine  and  put  down  the  glass. 

"Five  per  cent.,"  he  said;  "ten  per  cent.,  perhaps."  He 
touched  his  lips  with  his  dinner-napkin.  "1  have  turned 
out  some  creditable  boys." 

"Did  you  make  any  experiments  in  the  subjects  you 
taught?" 

"At  first.  But  one  of  the  things  we  discover  in  life  as 
we  grow  past  the  first  flush  of  beginning,  is  just  how  se- 
verely we  are  conditioned.  We  are  conditioned.  We  seem 
to  be  free.  And  we  are  in  a  net.  You  have  criticized  my 
curriculum  today  pretty  severely,  Mr.  Sydenham.  Much 
that  you  say  is  absolutely  right.  It  is  wasteful,  discursive, 


278  JOAN  AND  PETER 

ineffective.  Yes.  .  .  .  But  in  my  place  I  doubt  if  you.  could 
have  made  it  much  other  than  it  is.  ... 

"One  or  two  things  I  do.  Latin  grammar  here  is  taught 
on  lines  strictly  parallel  with  the  English  and  French  and 
German — that  is  to  say,  we  teach  languages  comparatively. 
It  was  troublesome  to  arrange,  but  it  makes  a  difference  men- 
tally. And  I  take  a  class  in  Formal  Logic ;  English  teaching 
is  imperfect,  expression  is  slovenly,  without  that.  The  boys 
write  English  verse.  The  mathematical  teaching  too,  is  as 
modern  as  the  examining  boards  will  let  it  be.  Small  things, 
perhaps.  But  you  do  not  know  the  obstacles. 

"Mr.  Sydenham,  your  talk  today  has  reminded  me  of  all 
the  magnificent  things  I  set  out  to  do  at  White  Court,  when 
I  sank  my  capital  in  building  White  Court  six  and  twenty 
years  ago.  When  1  found  that  I  couldn't  control  the  choice 
of  subjects,  when  I  found  that  in  that  matter  I  was  ruled  by 
the  sort  of  schools  and  colleges  the  boys  had  to  go  on  to  and 
by  the  preposterous  examinations  they  would  have  to  pass, 
then  1  told  myself,  'at  least  I  can  cultivate  their  characters 
and  develop  something  like  a  soul  in  them,  instead  of  crush- 
ing out  individuality  and  imagination  as  most  schools  do. . .  .' 

"Well,  1  think  I  have  a  house  of  clean-minded  and  cheer- 
ful and  willing  boys,  and  I  think  they  all  tell  the  truth.  .  .  ." 

"I  don't  know  what  I'm  to  do  with  the  religious  teaching 
of  these  two  youngsters  of  mine,"  said  Oswald  abruptly. 
"Practically,  they're  Godless." 

Mr.  Mackinder  did  not  speak  for  a  little  while.  Then  he 
said,  "It  is  almost  unavoidable,  under  existing  conditions, 
that  the  religious  teaching  in  a  school  should  be — formal  and 
orthodox. 

"For  my  own  part — I'm  liberal,"  said  Mr.  Mackinder, 
and  added,  "very  liberal.  Let  me  tell  you,  Mr.  Sydenham, 
exactly  how  I  see  things." 

He  paused  for  a  moment  as  if  he  collected  his  views. 

"If  a  little  boy  has  grown  up  in  a  home,  in  the  sort  of 
home  which  one  might  describe  as  God-fearing,  if  he  has 
not  only  heard  of  God  but  seen  God  as  a  living  influence 
upon  the  people  about  him,  then — then,  I  admit,  you  have 
something  real.  He  will  believe  in  God.  He  will  know  God. 
God — simply  because  of  the  faith  about  him — will  be  a  know- 


A  SEARCHING  OF  SCHOOLMASTERS        279 

able  reality.  God  is  a  faith.  In  men.  Such  a  boy's  world 
will  fall  into  shape  about  the  idea  of  God.  He  will  take  God 
as  a  matter  of  course.  Such  a  boy  can  be  religious  from 
childhood — yes.  .  .  But  there  are  very  few  such  homes." 

"Less,  probably,  than  there  used  to  be?" 

Mr.  Mackinder  disavowed  an  answer  by  a  gesture  of  hands 
and  shoulders.  He  went  on,  frowning  slightly  as  he  talked. 
He  wanted  to  say  exactly  what  he  thought.  "For  all  other 
boys,  Mr.  Sydenham,  God,  for  all  practical  purposes,  does 
not  exist.  Their  worlds  have  been  made  without  him ;  they 
do  not  think  in  terms  of  him ;  and  if  he  is  to  come  into  their 
lives  at  all  he  must  come  in  from  the  outside — a  discovery, 
like  a  mighty  rushing  wind.  By  what  is  called  Conversion. 
At  adolescence.  Until  that  happens  you  must  build  the  soul 
on  pride,  on  honour,  on  the  decent  instincts.  It  is  all  you 
have.  And  the  less  they  hear  about  God  the  better.  They 
will  not  understand.  It  will  be  a  cant  to  them — a  kind  of 
indelicacy.  The  two  greatest  things  in  the  world  have  been 
the  most  vulgarized.  God  and  sex.  .  .  If  I  had  my  own 
wav  I  would  have  no  religious  services  for  my  boys  at  all." 

"Instead  of  which?" 

Mr.  Mackinder  paused  impressively  before  replying. 

"The  local  curate  is  preparing  two  of  my  elder  boys  for 
Confirmation  at  the  present  time." 

He  gazed  gloomily  at  the  tablecloth.  "If  one  could  do  as 
one  liked ! "  he  said.  ' '  If  only  one  could  do  as  one  liked ! ' ' 

But  now  Oswald  was  realizing  for  the  first  time  the  eter- 
nal tragedy  of  the  teacher,  that  sower  of  unseen  harvests, 
that  reaper  of  thistles  and  the  wind,  that  serf  of  custom, 
that  subjugated  rebel,  that  feeble,  persistent  antagonist  of 
the  triumphant  things  that  rule  him.  And  behind  that  im- 
mediate tragedy  Oswald  was  now  apprehending  for  the  first 
time  something  more  universally  tragic,  an  incessantly  re- 
curring story  of  high  hopes  and  a  grey  ending ;  the  story  of 
boys  and  girls,  clean  and  sweet-minded,  growing  up  into  life, 
and  of  the  victory  of  world  inertia,  of  custom  drift  and  the 
tarnishing  years. 

Mr.  Mackinder  spoke  of  his  own  youth.  Quite  early  in 
life  had  come  physical  humiliations,  the  realization  that  his 
slender  and  delicate  physique  debarred  him  from  most  ac- 


280  JOAN  AND  PETEE 

tive  occupations,  and  his  resolve  to  be  of  use  in  some  field 
where  his  weak  and  undersized  body  would  be  at  no  great 
disadvantage.  "I  made  up  my  mind  that  teaching  should 
be  my  religion,"  he  said. 

He  told  of  the  difficulties  he  had  encountered  in  his  at- 
tempts to  get  any  pedagogic  science  or  training.  "This  is 
the  most  difficult  profession  in  the  world,"  he  said,  "and  the 
most  important.  Yet  it  is  not  studied ;  it  has  no  established 
practice;  it  is  not  endowed.  Buildings  are  endowed  and 
institutions,  but  not  teachers."  And  in  Great  Britain,  in 
the  schools  of  the  classes  that  will  own  and  rule  the  country, 
ninety-nine  per  cent,  of  the  work  was  done  by  unskilled 
workmen,  by  low-grade,  genteel  women  and  young  men. 
In  America  the  teachers  were  nearly  all  women.  "How 
can  we  expect  to  raise  a  nation  nearly  as  good  as  we  might 
do  under  such  a  handicap?"  He  had  read  and  learnt 
what  he  could  about  teaching;  he  had  served  for  small  sal- 
aries in  schools  that  seemed  living  and  efficient;  finally  he 
had  built  his  own  school  with  his  own  money.  He  had  had 
the  direst  difficulties  in  getting  a  staff  together.  "What 
can  one  expect?"  he  said.  "We  pay  them  hardly  better 
than  shop  assistants — less  than  bank  clerks.  You  see  the 
relative  importance  of  things  in  the  British  mind."  What 
hope  or  pride  was  there  to  inspire  an  assistant  schoolmaster 
to  do  good  work? 

"I  thought  I  could  make  a  school  different  from  all  other 
schools,  and  I  found  I  had  to  make  a  school  like  most  other 
fairly  good  schools.  I  had  to  work  for  what  the  parents 
required  of  me,  and  the  ideas  of  the  parents  had  been  shaped 
by  their  schools.  I  had  never  dreamt  of  the  immensity  of 
the  resistance  these  would  offer  to  constructive  change.  In 
this  world  there  are  incessant  changes,  but  most  of  them  are 
landslides  or  epidemics.  ...  I  tried  to  get  away  from  stereo- 
typing examinations.  I  couldn't.  I  tried  to  get  away  from 
formal  soul-destroying  religion.  I  couldn't.  I  tried  to  get 
a  staff  of  real  assistants.  I  couldn't.  I  had  to  take  what 
came.  I  had  to  be  what  was  required  of  me.  .  .  . 

"One  works  against  time  always.  Over  against  the 
Parents.  It  is  not  only  the  boys  one  must  educate,  but  the 
parents — let  alone  one's  self.  The  parents  demand  impos- 


sible  things.  I  have  been  asked  for  Greek  and  for  book- 
keeping by  double-entry  by  the  same  parent.  1  had — I  had 
to  leave  the  matter — as  if  I  thought  such  things  were  pos- 
sible. After  all,  the  Parent  is  master.  One  can't  run  a 
school  without  boys." 

"You'd  get  same  boys,"  said  Oswald. 

"Not  enough.     I'm  up  against  time.     The  school  has  to 

pay." 

"Can't  you  hold  out  for  a  time?  Run  the  school  on  a 
handful  of  oatmeal?" 

"It's  running  it  on  an  overdraft  I  don't  fancy.  You're 
not  a  married  man,  Mr.  Sydenham,  with  sons  to  consider." 

"No,"  said  Oswald  shortly.  "But  I  have  these  wards. 
And,  after  all,  there's  not  only  today  but  tomorrow.  If  the 

world  is  going  wrong  for  want  of  education .  If  you 

don't  give  it  your  sons  will  suffer." 

"Tomorrow,  perhaps.  But  today  comes  first.  I'm  up 
against  time.  Oh,  I'm  up  against  time." 

He  sat  with  his  hands  held  out  supine  on  the  table  before 
him. 

"I  started  my  school  twenty -seven  years  ago  next  Hilary. 
And  it  seems  like  yesterday.  When  I  started  it  I  meant  it 
to  be  something  memorable  in  schools.  ...  I  jumped  into  it. 
I  thought  I  should  swim  about.  ...  It  was  like  jumping  into 
the  rapids  of  Niagara.  I  was  seized,  I  was  rushed  along. 
.  .  .  Ai!  Ai!  .  .  ." 

"Time's  against  us  all,"  said  Oswald.  "I  suppose  the 
next  glacial  age  will  overtake  us  long  before  we're  ready  to 
fight  out  our  destiny." 

"If  you  want  to  feel  the  generations  rushing  to  waste," 
said  Mr.  Mackinder,  "like  rapids — like  rapids — you  must  put 
your  heart  and  life  into  a  private  school." 


CHAPTER  THE  ELEVENTH 

ADOLESCENCE 
§    1 

"f  |  ^HE  generations  rushing  to  waste  like  rapids — like 

rapids.  ..." 

JL         Ten  years  later  Oswald  found  himself  repeating 
the  words  of  the  little  private  schoolmaster. 

He  was  in  the  gravest  perplexity.  Joan  was  now  nineteen 
and  a  half  and  Peter  almost  of  age,  and  they  had  had  a 
violent  quarrel.  They  would  not  live  in  the  same  house  to- 
gether any  longer,  they  declared.  Peter  had  gone  back  over- 
night to  Cambridge  on  his  motor  bicycle;  Joan's  was  out  of 
order — an  embittering  addition  to  her  distress — and  she  had 
cycled  on  her  push  bicycle  over  the  hills  that  morning  to 
Bishop's  Stortford  to  catch  the  Cambridge  train.  And  Os- 
wald was  left  to  think  over  the  situation  and  all  that  had 
led  to  it. 

He  sat  alone  in  the  May  sunshine  in  the  little  arbour 
that  overlooked  his  rose  garden  at  Pelham  Ford,  trying  to 
grasp  all  that  had  happened  to  these  stormy  young  people 
since  he  had  so  boldly  taken  the  care  of  their  lives  into  his 
hands.  He  found  himself  trying  to  retrace  the  phases  of 
their  upbringing,  and  his  thoughts  went  wide  and  far  over 
the  problem  of  human  training.  Suddenly  he  had  discovered 
his  charges  adult.  Joan  had  stood  before  him,  amazingly 
grown  up — a  woman,  young,  beautiful,  indignant. 

Who  could  have  foretold  ten  years  ago  that  Joan  would 
have  been  declaring  with  tears  in  her  voice  but  much  stiff- 
ness in  her  manner,  that  she  had  ''stood  enough"  from  Peter, 
and  calling  him  "weak." 

"He  insults  all  my  friends,  Nobby,"  she  had  said,  "and 

as  for  his .     He's  like  that  puppy  we  had  who  dug  up 

rotten  bones  we  had  never  suspected,  all  over  the  garden. 

"Oh!  his  women  are  horrible!"  Joan  had  cried.  .  .  . 

282 


ADOLESCENCE  283 


§  2 

Oswald's  choice  of  a  permanent  home  at  Pelham  Ford 
had  been  largely  determined  by  the  educational  requirements 
of  Joan  and  Peter.  While  Peter  had  been  at  "White  Court 
and  Joan  at  Highmorton  School  twelve  miles  away,  Oswald 
had  occupied  a  not  very  well  furnished  ''furnished  house" 
at  Margate.  When  Peter,  after  an  inquisition  by  Oswald 
into  English  Public  Schools,  had  been  awarded  at  last  as  a 
sort  of  prize,  with  reservations,  to  Caxton,  Oswald — con- 
vinced now  by  his  doctors  and  his  own  disagreeable  experi- 
ences that  he  must  live  in  England  for  the  rest  of  his  life  if 
he  was  to  hope  for  any  comfort  or  activity — decided  to  set 
up  a  permanent  home  writh  a  garden  and  buildings  that  would 
be  helpful  through  days  of  dullness  in  some  position  reason- 
ably accessible  from  London,  Caxton  and  Margate,  and  later 
on  from  Cambridge,  to  which  they  were  both  predestined. 
After  some  search  he  found  the  house  he  needed  in  the  pretty 
little  valley  of  the  Rash,  that  runs  north-eastward  from 
Ware.  The  Stubland  aunts  still  remained  as  tenants  of 
The  Ingle-Nook,  and  made  it  a  sort  of  alternative  home  for 
the  youngsters. 

The  country  to  the  north  and  east  of  Ware  is  a  country 
of  miniature  gorges  with  frequent  water-splashes.  The 
stream  widens  and  crosses  the  road  in  a  broad,  pebbly  shallow 
of  ripples  just  at  the  end  of  Pelham  Ford,  there  is  a  cause- 
way with  a  white  handrail  for  bicycles  and  foot  passengers 
beside  the  ford,  and  beyond  it  is  an  inn  and  the  post  office 
and  such  thatched,  whitewashed  homes  as  constitute  the  vil- 
lage. Then  beyond  comes  a  row  of  big  trees  and  the  high 
red  wall  and  iron  gates  of  this  house  Oswald  had  taken. 
The  church  of  Pelham  Ford  is  a  little  humped,  spireless 
building  up  the  hill  to  the  left.  The  stream  brawls  along  for 
a  time  beside  the  road.  Through  the  gates  of  the  house  one 
looks  across  a  lawn  barred  by  the  shadows  of  big  trees,  at 
a  blazing  flower-garden  that  goes  up  a  series  of  terraces  to 
the  little  red  tiled  summerhouse  that  commands  the  view  of 
the  valley.  The  house  is  to  the  right  and  near  the  road,  a 
square  comfortable  eighteenth-century  red-brick  house  with 
ivy  on  its  shadowed  side  and  fig  trees  and  rose  trees  towards 


284  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  sun.  It  has  a  classical  portico,  and  a  grave  but  friendly 
expression. 

The  Margate  house  had  been  a  camp,  but  this  was  furnished 
with  some  deliberation.  Oswald  had  left  a  miscellany  of 
possessions  behind  him  in  Uganda  which  Muir  had  packed 
and  sent  on  after  him  when  it  was  settled  that  there  could 
be  no  return  to  Africa.  The  hall  befitted  the  home  of  a 
member  of  the  Plantain  Club;  African  spoils  adorned  it, 
three  lions'  heads,  a  white  rhinoceros  head,  elephants'  feet, 
spears,  gourds,  tusks;  in  the  midst  a  large  table  took  the 
visitor's  hat  and  stick,  and  bore  a  large  box  for  the  post. 
Out  of  this  hall  opened  a  little  close  study  Oswald  rarely 
used  except  when  Joan  and  Peter  and  their  friends  were  at 
home  and  a  passage  led  to  a  sunny,  golden-brown  library  pos- 
sessing three  large  southward  windows  on  the  garden,  a  room 
it  had  pleased  him  greatly  to  furnish,  and  in  which  he  did 
most  of  his  writing.  It  had  a  parquet  floor  and  Oriental  rugs 
like  sunlit  flower-beds.  Across  the  hall,  opposite  the  study, 
was  a  sort  of  sittingroom-livingroom  which  was  given  over 
to  Joan  and  Peter.  It  had  been  called  the  Schoolroom  in  the 
days  when  their  holiday  visits  had  been  mitigated  by  the 
presence  of  some  temporary  governess  or  tutor,  and  now  that 
those  disciplined  days  were  over  their  two  developing  per- 
sonalities still  jostled  in  the  one  apartment.  A  large  pleas- 
ant drawing-room  and  a  dining-room  completed  the  tale  of 
rooms  on  the  ground  floor. 

In  this  room  across  the  hall  there  was  much  that  would 
have  repaid  research  on  the  part  of  Oswald.  The  room  was 
a  joint  room  only  when  Joan  and  Peter  were  without  guests 
in  the  house.  Whenever  there  were  guests,  whether  they 
were  women  or  men,  Joan  turned  out  and  the  room  became 
a  refuge  or  rendezvous  for  Peter.  It  was  therefore  rather 
Peter's. than  Joan's.  Here  as  in  most  things  it  was  Peter's 
habit  to  prevail  over  Joan.  But  she  had  her  rights ;  she  had 
had  a  voice  in  the  room's  decoration,  a  share  in  its  disorder. 
The  upper  bookshelves  to  the  right  of  the  fireplace  were  hers 
and  the  wall  next  to  that.  Against  this  stood  her  bureau, 
locked  and  secure,  over  and  against  Peter's  bureau.  Oswald 
had  given  them  these  writing  desks  three  Christmasses  ago. 
But  the  mess  on  the  table  under  the  window  was  Peter's, 


ADOLESCENCE  285 

and  Peter  had  more  than  his  fair  share  of  the  walls.  The 
stuffed  birds  and  animals  and  a  row  of  sculls  were  the  result 
of  a  "Mooseum"  phase  of  Peter's  when  he  was  fourteen. 
The  water-colour  pictures  were  Peter's.  The  hearthrug  was 
the  lion-skin  that  Peter  still  believed  had  been  brought  for 
him  from  Nairobi  by  Oswald. 

Peter  could  caricature,  and  his  best  efforts  were  framed 
here;  his  style  was  a  deliberate  compliment  to  the  incom- 
parable Max.  He  had  been  very  successful  twice  in  bring- 
ing out  the  latent  fierceness  of  Joan  ;  one  not  ungraceful  effort 
was  called  "The  Scalp  Dance,"  the  other,  less  pleasing  to 
its  subject,  represented  Joan  in  full  face  with  her  hands  be- 
hind her  back  and  her  feet  apart,  "Telling  the  Whole  Troof." 
Joan,  alas!  had  no  corresponding  skill  for  a  retort,  but  she 
had  framed  an  enlargement  of  a  happy  snapshot  of  Peter 
on  the  garden  wall.  She  had  stood  below  and  held  her 
camera  up  so  that  Peter's  boots  and  legs  were  immense  and 
his  head  dwindled  to  nothing  in  perspective.  So  seen,  he 
became  an  embodiment  of  masculine  brutality.  The  legend 
was,  "The  Camera  can  Detect  what  our  Eyes  Cannot." 

One  corner  of  this  room  was  occupied  by  a  pianola  piano 
and  a  large  untidy  collection  of  classical  music  rolls;  right 
and  left  of  the  fireplace  the  bookshelves  bore  an  assortment 
of  such  literature  as  appealed  in  those  days  to  animated 
youth,  classics  of  every  period  from  Plato  to  Shaw,  and  such 
moderns  as  Compton  Macken/ie,  Masefield,  Gilbert  Caiman 
and  Ezra  Pound.  Back  numbers  of  The  Freewoman,  The 
New  Aye,  The  New  Statesman,  and  The  Poetry  Review 
mingled  on  the  lowest  shelf.  There  was  a  neat  row  of  philo- 
sophical textbooks  in  the  Joan  section ;  Joan  for  no  particu- 
lar reason  was  taking  the  moral  science  tripos:  and  a  mi- 
croscope stood  on  Peter's  table,  for  he  was  biological.  .  .  . 

§  3 

Oswald's  domestic  arrangements  had  at  first  been  a  grave 
perplexity.  In  Uganda  he  had  kept  house  very  well  with  a 
Swahili  over-man  and  a  number  of  "boys";  in  Margate  this 
sort  of  service  was  difficult  to  obtain,  and  the  holiday  needs 
of  the  children  seemed  to  demand  a  feminine  influence  of 


286  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  governess-companion  type,  a  "lady."  A  succession  of 
refined  feminine  personalities  had  intersected  these  years  of 
Oswald's  life.  They  were  all  ladies  by  birth  and  profes- 
sion, they  all  wore  collars  supported  by  whalebone  about  their 
necks,  and  they  all  developed  and  betrayed  a  tenderness  for 
Oswald  that  led  to  a  series  of  flights  to  the  Climax  Club  and 
firm  but  generous  dismissals.  Oswald's  ideas  of  matrimony 
were  crude  and  commonplace;  he  could  imagine  himself 
marrying  no  one  but  a  buxom  young  woman  of  three-and- 
twenty,  and  he  could  not  imagine  any  buxom  young  woman 
of  three-and-twenty  taking  a  healthy  interest  in  a  man  over 
forty  with  only  half  a  face  and  fits  of  fever  and  fretfulness. 
When  these  ladies  one  after  another  threw  out  their  gentle 
intimations  he  had  the  ingratitude  to  ascribe  their  courage 
to  a  sense  of  his  own  depreciated  matrimonial  value.  This 
caused  just  enough  indignation  to  nerve  him  to  the  act  of 
dismissal.  But  on  each  occasion  he  spent  the  best  part  of  a 
morning  and  made  serious  inroads  upon  the  club  notepaper 
before  the  letter  of  dismissal  was  framed,  and  he  always  fell 
back  upon  the  stock  lie  that  he  was  going  abroad  to  a  Kur-Ort 
and  was  going  to  lock  up  the  house.  On  each  occasion  the 
house  was  locked  up  for  three  or  four  weeks,  and  Oswald 
lived  a  nomadic  existence  until  a  fresh  lady  could  be  found. 
Finally  God  sent  him  Mrs.  Moxton. 

She  came  in  at  Margate  during  an  interregnum  while  Aunt 
Phyllis  was  in  control.  Aunt  Phyllis  after  a  reflective  inter- 
view passed  her  on  to  Oswald.  She  was  more  like  Britannia 
than  one  could  have  imagined  possible ;  her  face  was  perhaps 
a  little  longer  and  calmer  and  her  pink  chins  rather  more 
numerous. 

"I  understand,"  she  said,  seating  herself  against  Oswald's 
desk,  "that  you  are  in  need  of  some  one  to  take  charge  of 
your  household." 

'Did  you — hear?"  began  Oswald. 

'It's  the  talk  of  Margate,"  she  said  calmly. 

'So    I    understand   that   you    are    prepared    to   be    the 
lady- 

'I  am  not  a  lady,"  said  Mrs.  Moxton  with  a  faint  asperity. 

'T  beg  your  pardon,"  said  Oswald. 

'I  am  a  housekeeper,"  she  said,  as  who  should  say:  "at 


ADOLESCENCE  287 

least  give  me  credit  for  that."  "I  have  had  experience  with 
a  single  gentleman." 

There  seemed  to  be  an  idea  in  it. 

"I  was  housekeeper  to  the  late  Mr.  Justice  Benlees  for 
some  years,  until  he  died,  and  then  unhappily,  being  in  re- 
ceipt of  a  small  pension  from  him,  I  took  to  keeping  a  board- 
ing-house. Winnipeg  House.  On  the  Marine  Parade.  A 
most  unpleasant  and  anxious  experience."  Her  note  of  in- 
dignation returned,  and  the  clear  pink  of  her  complexion 
deepened  by  a  shade.  "A  torrent  of  Common  People." 

"Exactly,"  said  Oswald.  "I  have  seen  them  walking 
about  the  town.  Beastly  new  yellow  boots.  And  fast, 
squeaky  little  girls  in  those  new  floppy  white  hats.  You 
think  you  could  dispose  of  the  boarding-house?" 

Mrs.  Moxton  compressed  her  chins  slightly  in  assent. 

"It's  a  saleable  concern?" 

"There  are  those,"  said  Mrs.  Moxton  with  a  faint  sense 
of  the  marvels  of  God's  universe  in  her  voice,  "who  would 
be  glad  of  it." 

He  rested  his  face  on  his  hand  and  regarded  her  profile 
very  earnestly  with  his  one  red-brown  eye — from  the  begin- 
ning to  the  end  of  the  interview  Mrs.  Moxton  never  once 
looked  straight  at  him.  He  perceived  that  she  was  in- 
capable of  tenderness,  dissimulation,  or  any  personal  rela- 
tionship, a  woman  in  profile,  a  woman  with  a  pride  in  her 
work,  a  woman  to  be  trusted. 

"You'll  do,  "he  said. 

"Of  course,  Sir,  you  will  take  up  my  references  first. 
They  are  a  little — old,  but  I  think  you  will  find  them  satis- 
factory. ' ' 

"I  have  no  doubts  about  your  references,  Mrs.  Moxton, 
but  they  shall  be  taken  up  nevertheless,  duly  and  in  order." 

"Thank  you,  Sir,"  said  Mrs.  Moxton,  giving  him  a  three- 
quarter  face,  and  almost  looking  at  him  in  her  pleasure. 

And  thereafter  Mrs.  Moxton  ruled  the  household  of  Os- 
wald according  to  the  laws  and  habits  of  the  late  Mr.  Justice 
Benlees,  who  had  evidently  been  a  very  wise,  comfortable, 
and  intelligent  man.  When  she  came  on  from  the  uncon- 
genial furniture  at  Margate  to  the  comfort  and  beauty  of 
Pelham  Ford  she  betrayed  a  certain  approval  by  expanding 


288  JOAN  AND  PETER 

an  inch  or  so  in  every  direction  and  letting  out  two  new 
chins,  but  otherwise  she  made  no  remark.  She  radiated 
decorum  and  a  faint  smell  of  lavender.  She  had,  it  seemed, 
always  possessed  a  black-watered-silk  dress  and  a  gold  chain. 
Even  Lady  Charlotte  approved  of  her. 

For  some  years  Mrs.  Moxton  enabled  Oswald  to  disregard 
the  social  difficulties  that  are  supposed  to  surround  feminine 
adolescence.  Joan  and  Peter  got  along  very  well  with  Pel- 
ham  Ford  as  their  home,  and  no  other  feminine  control  ex- 
cept an  occasional  visit  from  the  Stubland  aunts.  Then  Aunt 
Charlotte  became  tiresome  because  Joan  was  growing  up. 
"How  can  the  gal  grow  up  properly,"  she  asked,  "even  con- 
sidering what  she  is,  in  a  house  in  which  there  isn't  a  lady 
at  the  head?" 

Oswald  reflected  upon  the  problem.  He  summoned  Mrs. 
Moxton  to  his  presence. 

"Mrs.  Moxton,"  he  said,  "when  Miss  Joan  is  here,  I've 
been  thinking,  don't  you  think  she  ought  to  be,  so  to  speak, 
mistress  of  the  place?" 

"I  have  been  wondering  when  you  would  make  the  change, 
Mr.  Syclenham,"  said  Mrs.  Moxton.  "I  shall  be  very  pleased 
to  take  my  orders  from  Miss  Joan." 

And  after  that  Mrs.  Moxton  used  to  come  to  Joan  when- 
ever Joan  was  at  Pelham  Ford,  and  tell  her  what  orders  she 
had  to  give  for  the  day.  And  when  Joan  had  visitors,  Mrs. 
Moxton  told  Joan  just  exactly  what  arrangements  Joan  was 
to  order  Mrs.  Moxton  to  make.  In  all  things  that  mattered 
Mrs.  Moxton  ruled  Joan  with  an  obedience  of  iron.  Her 
curtseys,  slow,  deliberate  and  firm,  insisted  that  Joan  was  a 
lady — and  had  got  to  be  one.  She  took  to  calling  Joan 
"Ma'am."  Joan  had  to  live  up  to  it,  and  did.  Visitors  in- 
creased after  the  young  people  were  at  Cambridge.  Junior 
dons  from  Newnham  and  Crirton  would  come  and  chaperon 
their  hostess,  and  Peter  treated  Oswald  to  a  variety  of  sam- 
ples of  the  younger  male  generation.  Some  of  the  samples 
Oswald  liked  more  than  others.  And  he  concealed  very  care- 
fully from  Aunt  Charlotte  how  mixed  these  young  gatherings 
were,  how  light  was  the  Cambridge  standard  of  chaperonage, 
and  how  very  junior  were  some  of  the  junior  dons  from  the 
women's  colleges. 


ADOLESCENCE  289 


§4 

When  children  are  small  we  elders  in  charge  are  apt  to 
suppose  them  altogether  plastic.  There  are  resistances,  it  is 
true,  but  these  express  themselves  at  first  only  in  tantrums, 
in  apparently  quite  meaningless  outbreaks;  we  impose  our 
phrases  and  values  so  completely,  that  such  spasmodic  op- 
position seems  to  signify  nothing.  We  impose  our  names  for 
things,  our  classifications  with  their  thousand  implications, 
our  interpretations.  The  child  is  imitative  and  obedient  by 
instinct,  its  personality  for  the  most  part  latent,  warily  hid- 
den. That  is  "hand,"  we  dictate,  that  is  "hat,"  that  is 
"pussy  cat,"  that  is  "pretty,  pretty,"  that  is  "good,"  that 
is  "nasty,"  that  is  "ugly— Ugh!"  That  again  is  "fear- 
some; run  away!"  There  is  no  discussion.  If  we  know  our 
parental  business  we  are  able  to  establish  all  sorts  of  habits, 
readinesses,  dispositions  in  these  entirely  plastic  days. 
"Time  for  Peter  to  go  to  bed,"  uttered  with  gusto,  becomes 
the  signal  for  an  interesting  ritual  upon  which  he  embarks 
with  dignity.  Until  some  idiot  visitor  remarks  loudly, 
"Doesn't  he  hate  going  to  bed?  I  always  hated  going  to 
bed."  Whereupon  in  that  matter  the  seeds  of  reflection  and 
dissent  are  sown  in  the  little  mind. 

And  so  with  most  other  matters.  For  a  few  years  of  ad- 
vantage the  new  mind  is  clay  and  we  have  it  to  ourselves, 
and  then,  still  clay,  it  becomes  perceptibly  resistent,  per- 
ceptibly disposed  to  recover  some  former  shape  we  have 
given  it  or  to  take  an  outline  of  its  own.  It  discovers  we  are 
not  divine  and  that  even  Dadda  cannot  recall  the  sunset. 
It  is  not  only  that  other  minds  are  coming  in  to  modify  and 
contradict  our  decisions.  We  contradict  ourselves  and  it 
notes  the  contradiction.  And  old  Nature  begins  to  take  an 
increasing  share  in  the  accumulating  personality.  Apart 
from  what  we  give  and  those  others  give,  things  bubble  up 
inside  it,  desires,  imaginations,  creative  dreams.  By  imper- 
ceptible degrees  the  growing  mind  slips  away  from  us.  A 
little  while  ago  it  seemed  like  some  open  vessel  into  which  we 
could  pour  whatever  we  chose;  now  suddenly  it  is  closed  and 
locked,  hiding  a  fermentation. 


290  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Perhaps  things  have  always  been  more  or  less  so  between 
elders  and  young,  but  in  the  old  days  of  slower  change  what 
fathers  and  mothers  had  to  tell  the  child,  priest  and  master 
re-echoed,  laws  and  institutions  confirmed,  the  practice  of 
every  one,  good  or  evil,  endorsed  in  black  or  white.  But 
from  the  break-up  of  the  Catholic  culture  in  England  on- 
ward there  has  been  an  unceasing  conflict  between  more  and 
more  divergent  stories  about  life,  and  in  the  last  half  century 
that  clash  has  enormously  intensified.  What  began  as  a  war 
of  ideals  became  at  last  a  chaos.  Adolescence  was  once  either 
an  obedience  or  a  rebellion;  at  the  opening  of  the  twentieth 
century  it  had  become  an  interrogation  and  an  experiment. 
One  heard  very  much  of  the  right  of  the  parent  to  bring  up 
children  in  his  own  religion,  his  own  ideas,  but  no  one  ever 
bothered  to  explain  how  that  right  was  to  be  preserved.  In 
Ireland  one  found  near  Dublin  educational  establishments 
surrounded  by  ten-foot  walls  topped  with  broken  glass,  pro- 
tecting a  Catholic  atmosphere  for  a  few  precious  and  privi- 
leged specimens  of  the  Erse  nation.  Mr.  James  Joyce  in  his 
Portrait  of  the  Artist  as  a  Young  Man,  has  bottled  a  speci- 
men of  that  Catholic  atmosphere  for  the  astonishment  of  pos- 
terity. The  rest  of  the  youth  of  the  changing  world  lay 
open  to  every  wind  of  suggestion  that  blew.  The  parent  or 
guardian  found  himself  a  mere  competitor  for  the  attention 
and  convictions  of  his  charges. 

§  5 

Through  childhood  and  boyhood  and  girlhood,  Peter's 
sex  and  seniority  alike  had  conspired  to  give  him  a  leader- 
ship over  Joan.  His  seemed  the  richer,  livelier  mind,  he 
told  most  of  the  stories  and  initiated  most  of  the  games ;  Joan 
was  the  follower.  That  masculine  ascendancy  lasted  until 
Peter  was  leaving  Caxton ;  in  spite  of  various  emancipating 
forces  at  Highmorton.  Then  in  less  than  a  year  Joan  took 
possession  of  herself. 

Reserve  is  a  necessary  grace  in  all  younger  brothers  and 
sisters.  Peter  spread  his  reveries  as  a  peacock  spreads  its 
tail,  but  Joan  kept  her  dreams  discreetly  private.  All  youth 
lives  much  in  reverie ;  thereby  the  stronger  minds  anticipate 


ADOLESCENCE  291 

and  rehearse  themselves  for  life  in  a  thousand  imaginations, 
the  weaker  ones  escape  from  it.  Against  that  early  predomi- 
nance of  Peter,  Joan  maintained  her  self-respect  by  exten- 
sive secret  supplements  of  the  Bungo-Peter  saga.  For  ex- 
ample she  was  Bungo-Peter 's  "Dearest  Beloved."  Peter 
never  suspected  how  Bungo-Peter  and  she  cuddled  up  to- 
gether at  the  camp  fires  and  were  very  close  and  warm  every 
night,  until  she  went  off  to  sleep.  .  .  . 

When  she  was  about  fourteen  Joan's  imagination  passed 
out  of  the  phase  of  myth  and  saga  into  the  world  of  romance. 
The  real  world  drew  closer  to  her.  Bungo-Peter  vanished; 
Nobby  shrank  down  to  a  real  Uncle  Nobby.  Her  childish 
reveries  had  disregarded  possibility ;  now  the  story  had  to  be 
plausible;  it  had  to  join  on  to  Highmorton  and  The  Ingle- 
Nook  and  Pelham  Ford ;  its  heroine  had  to  be  conceivable  as 
the  real  Joan.  And  with  the  coming  of  reality,  came  moods. 
There  were  times  when  she  felt  dull,  and  the  world  looked  on 
her  with  a  grey  and  stupid  face,  and  other  times  to  compen- 
sate her  for  these  dull  phases,  seasons  of  unwonted  exalta- 
tion. It  was  as  if  her  being  sometimes  drew  itself  together 
in  order  presently  to  leap  and  extend  itself. 

In  these  new  phases  of  expansion  she  had  the  most  perfect 
conviction  that  life,  and  particularly  her  life,  was  wonderful 
and  beautiful  and  destined  to  be  more  and  more  so.  She 
began  to  experience  a  strange  new  happiness  in  mere  exist- 
ence, a  happiness  that  came  with  an  effect  of  revelation.  It 
is  hard  to  convey  the  peculiar  delight  that  invaded  her  dur- 
ing these  phases.  It  was  almost  as  if  the  earth  had  just  been 
created  for  her  and  given  to  her  as  a  present.  There  were 
moments  when  the  world  was  a  crystal  globe  of  loveliness 
about  her,  moments  of  ecstatic  realization  of  a  universal 
beauty.  The  slightest  things  would  suffice  to  release  this  sun- 
shine in  her  soul.  She  would  discover  the  intensest  delight 
in  little,  hitherto  disregarded  details,  in  the  colour  of  a  leaf 
held  up  to  the  light,  or  the  rhythms  of  ripples  on  a  pond  or 
the  touch  of  a  bird's  feather.  There  were  moments  when  she 
wanted  to  kiss  the  sunset,  and  times  when  she  would  clamber 
over  the  end  wall  of  the  garden  at  Pelham  Ford  in  order  to 
lie  hidden  and  still,  with  every  sense  awake,  in  the  big  clump 
of  bracken  in  the  corner  by  the  wood  beyond.  The  smell  of 


292  JOAN  AND  PETER 

crushed  bracken  delighted  her  intensely.  She  wanted  to  be 
a  nymph  then  and  not  a  girl  in  clothes.  And  shining  sum- 
mer streams  and  lakes  roused  in  her  a  passionate  desire  to 
swim,  to  abandon  herself  wholly  to  the  comprehensive  sweet 
silvery  caress  of  the  waters. 

In  the  days  of  the  Saga  story,  the  time  of  the  story  had 
always  been  Now — and  Never;  but  in  the  drama  of  adoles- 
cence the  time  of  all  Joan's  reveries  was  Tomorrow;  what 
she  dreamt  of  now  were  things  that  were  to  be  real  experi- 
ences in  quite  a  little  time,  when  she  had  grown  just  a  year 
or  so  older,  when  she  was  a  little  taller,  when  she  had  left 
school,  when  she  was  really  as  beautiful  as  she  hoped  to  be. 

The  world  about  her  by  example  and  precept,  by  plays 
and  stories  and  poems  and  histories,  was  supplying  her  with 
a  rich  confusion  of  material  for  these  anticipatory  sketches. 
One  main  history  emerged  in  her  fifteenth  year.  Jt  went  on 
for  many  months.  Joan  of  Arc  was  in  the  making  of  it,  and 
Jane  Shore,  and  Nell  Gwyn.  At  first  she  was  the  Lady  Joan, 
and  then  she  became  just  Joan  Stubland,  but  always  she  was 
the  king's  mistress. 

From  the  very  beginning  Joan  had  found  something  splen- 
did and  attractive  in  the  word  "mistress."  It  had  come  to 
her  first  in  a  history  lesson,  and  then  more  brightly  clad  in  a 
costume  novel.  But  it  was  a  very  glorious  and  noble  kind  of 
mistress  that  Joan  had  in  view.  Her  ideas  of  the  authority 
and  duties  of  a  mistress  were  vague ;  but  she  knew  that  a  mis- 
tress rules  by  beauty.  That  she  ruled  Joan  never  doubted 
— or  why  should  she  be  called  mistress?  And  she  prevailed 
over  queens,  so  French  history  had  instructed  her.  She  made 
war  and  peace.  Joan  of  Arc  was  inextricably  mixed  in  with 
the  vision.  She  was  a  beautiful  girl,  and  she  told  the  king 
of  France  what  to  do.  At  need  she  led  armies.  What  else 
but  a  mistress  could  you  call  her?  "Mistress  of  France," 
magnificent  phrase!  Of  such  ideas  was  Joan  Stubland 
woven.  The  king  perhaps  would  do  injustice,  or  neglect  a 
meritorious  case.  Then  Joan  Stubland  would  appear,  watch- 
ful and  dignified.  "No,"  she  would  say.  "That  must  not 
be.  1  am  the  king's  mistress." 

And  she  wore  a  kind  of  light  armour.  Without  skirts. 
Never  with  skirts.  Joan  at  fourteen  already  saw  long  skirts 


ADOLESCENCE  293 

ahead  of  her,  and  hated  them  as  a  man  might  hate  a  swamp 
that  lie  must  presently  cross  knee-deep. 

Where  the  king  went  Joan  went.  But  he  was  not  the  cur- 
rent king,  nor  his  destined  successor.  She  had  studied  these 
monarchs  in  the  illustrated  papers — and  in  the  news.  She 
did  not  think  much  of  them.  They  stood  down  out  of  Joan's 
dream  in  favour  of  a  younger  autocrat.  After  all,  was  there 
not  also  a  young  prince,  her  contemporary,  who  would  some 
day  be  king?  But  in  her  imagination  he  was  not  like  his 
published  portraits;  instead — and  this  is  curious — he  was 
rather  like  Peter.  He  was  as  much  like  Peter  as  any  one. 
This  was  all  of  Peter  that  ever  got  into  her  reveries,  for 
there  was  a  curious  bar  in  her  mind  to  Peter  being  thought 
of  either  as  her  lover  or  as  any  one  not  her  lover.  Some- 
thing obscure  in  her  composition  barred  any  such  direct 
imaginations  about  Peter. 

So,  contraxvise  to  all  established  morality  and  to  every- 
thing to  which  her  properly  constituted  teachers  were  trying 
to  shape  her,  a  chance  phrase  in  a  history  book  filled  the 
imagination  of  Joan  with  this  dream  of  a  different  sort  of 
woman's  life  altogether.  In  which  one  went  side  by  side 
with  a  man  in  a  manly  way,  sharing  his  power,  being  dear 
and  beautiful  to  him.  Compared  with  such  a  lot  who  would 
be  one  of  the.se  wives?  Who  would  stay  at  home  and — as  a 
consequence  apparently  of  the  religious  ceremony  of  matri- 
mony— have  babies  ? 

The  king's  mistress  story  was  Joan's  dominant  reverie,  but 
it  was  not  her  only  one.  It  was,  so  to  speak,  her  serial;  it 
was  always  "to  be  continued  in  our  next."  But  her  busy 
mind,  whenever  her  attention  was  not  fully  occupied,  was 
continually  spinning  romance;  beside  the  serial  story  there 
were  endless  incidental  ones.  Almost  always  they  were  love 
stories.  They  were  violent  and  adventurous  in  substance, 
full  of  chases,  fights,  and  confrontations,  but  Joan  did  not 
stint  herself  of  kissing  and  embraces.  There  were  times 
when  she  liked  tremendously  to  think  of  herself  kissing. 
Most  little  girls  of  thirteen  or  fourteen  are  thinking  with  the 
keenest  interest  and  curiosity  about  this  lover  business  and 
its  mysteries,  and  Joan  was  no  exception.  She  was  deeply 
interested  to  find  she  was  almost  as  old  as  Juliet.  Inspired 


294  JOAN  AND  PETER 

by  Shakespeare,  Joan  thought  quite  a  lot  about  balconies  and 
ladders — and  Romeo.  Some  of  her  school  contemporaries 
jested  about  these  things  and  were  very  arch  and  sly.  But 
she  was  as  shy  of  talking  about  love  as  she  was  prone  to  love 
reveries.  She  talked  of  flowers  and  poetry  and  music  and 
scenery  and  beautiful  things  as  though  they  were  things  in 
themselves,  but  in  her  heart  she  was  convinced  that  all  the 
loveliness  that  shone  upon  her  in  the  world  was  only  so  much 
intimation  of  the  coming  loveliness  of  love. 

The  outward  and  visible  disposition  of  Highmorton  School 
was  all  against  the  spirit  of  such  dreams.  The  disposition 
of  Highmorton  was  towards  a  scorn  of  males.  What  Joan 
knew  surely  to  be  lovely,  Highmorton  denounced  as  "soppy." 
"Soppy"  was  a  terrible  word  in  boys'  schools  and  girls' 
schools  alike,  a  flail  for  all  romance.  But  in  the  girls'  schools 
it  was  used  more  particularly  against  tender  thoughts  of 
men.  Highmorton  taught  the  revolt  of  women  from  the  love 
of  men — in  favour  of  the  love  of  women.  The  school  re- 
sounded always  with  the  achievements  of  the  one  important 
sex,  hitherto  held  back  by  man-made  laws  from  demonstrat- 
ing an  all-round  superiority.  The  staff  at  Highmorton  had 
all  a  common  hardness  of  demeanour ;  they  were  without  ex- 
ception suffragettes,  and  most  of  them  militant  suffragettes. 
They  played  hockey  with  great  violence,  and  let  the  elder 
girls  hear  them  say  ' '  damn ! ' '  The  ones  who  had  any  beauty 
aspired  to  sub-virile  effects;  they  impressed  small  adorers 
as  if  they  were  sexless  angels.  There  was  Miss  Oriana  Fro- 
bisher  (science)  with  the  glorious  wave  in  her  golden  hair 
and  the  flash  of  lightning  in  her  glasses.  She  had  done  great 
feats  with  love,  it  was  said ;  she  had  refused  a  professor  of 
botany  and  a  fabulously  rich  widower,  and  the  mathematical 
master  was  "gone"  on  her.  There  was  Miss  Kellaway,  dark 
and  pensive,  known  to  her  worshippers  as  "Queen  of  the 
Night,"  fragile,  and  yet  a  swift  and  nimble  forward.  Aunt 
Phoebe  also  had  become  a  leading  militant,  and  Aunt  Phyllis, 
who  wavered  on  the  verge  of  militancy,  continued  the  High- 
morton teaching  in  the  holidays.  "Absolute  equality  be- 
tween the  sexes,"  was  their  demand;  their  moderate  demand, 
seeing  what  men  were.  Joan  would  have  been  more  than 
human  not  to  take  the  colour  of  so  universal  a  teaching.  And 


ADOLESCENCE  295 

yet  in  her  reveries  there  was  always  one  man  exempt  from 
that  doom  of  general  masculine  inferiority.  She  had  no  use 
for  a  dream  lover — unless  he  was  dying  of  consumption  or, 
Tristram  fashion,  of  love-caused  wounds — who  could  not  out- 
run, out-fence,  out-wrestle  and  out-think  her,  or  for  a  situa- 
tion of  asserted  equality  which  could  not  dissolve  into  caress- 
ing devotion. 

§  6 

And  of  these  preoccupations  with  the  empire  and  the  duties 
and  destinies  of  the  empire  and  the  collective  affairs  of  man- 
kind, which  to  Oswald  were  the  very  gist  and  purpose  of 
education,  Highmorton  taught  Joan  practically  nothing. 
Miss  Jevons,  the  Head,  would  speak  now  and  then  of  "loy- 
alty to  the  crown"  in  a  rather  distant  way — Miss  Murga- 
troyd  had  been  wont  to  do  the  same  thing — and  for  the  rest 
left  politics  alone.  Except  that  there  was  one  thing,  one 
supreme  thing,  the  Vote.  When  first  little  Joan  heard  of 
the  Vote  at  Limpsfield  she  was  inclined  to  think  it  was  a 
flattened  red  round  thing  rather  like  the  Venerable  Bede  at 
the  top  of  the  flagstaff.  She  learned  little  better  at  High- 
morton. She  gathered  that  women  were  going  to  "get  the 
vote"  and  then  they  were  to  vote.  They  were  going  to  vote 
somehow  against  the  men  and  it  would  make  the  world  bet- 
ter, but  there  was  very  little  more  to  it  than  that.  The  ideas 
remained  strictly  personal,  strictly  dramatic.  Wicked  men 
like  Mr.  Asquith  who  opposed  the  vote  were  to  be  cast  down; 
one  of  the  dazzling  Pankhurst  family,  or  perhaps  Miss  Oriana 
Frobisher,  was  to  take  his  place.  Profound  scepticisms  about 
this  vote — in  her  heart  of  hearts  she  called  it  the  "old  Vote," 
were  hidden  by  Joan  from  the  general  observation  of  the 
school.  She  had  only  the  slightest  attacks  of  that  common 
schoolgirl  affliction,  schoolmistress  love;  she  never  idolized 
Miss  Jevons  or  Miss  Frobisher  or  Miss  Kellaway.  Their  en- 
thusiasm for  the  vote,  therefore,  prevented  hers. 

Later  on  it  was  to  be  different.  She  was  to  find  in  the 
vote  a  symbol  of  personal  freedom — and  an  excellent  excuse 
for  undergraduate  misbehaviour. 

It  is  true  Highmorton  School  presented  a  certain  amount 


296  JOAN  AND  PETER 

of  history  and  geography  to  Joan 's  mind,  but  in  no  way  as  a 
process  in  which  she  was  concerned.  She  grew  up  to  believe 
that  in  England  we  were  out  of  history,  out  of  geography, 
eternally  blessed  in  a  constitution  that  we  could  not  better, 
under  a  crown  which  was  henceforth  for  ever,  so  to  speak, 
the  centre  of  an  everlasting  social  tea-party,  and  that  party 
"politics"  in  Parliament  and  the  great  Vote  struggle  had 
taken  the  place  of  such  real  convulsions  of  human  fortune 
as  occurred  in  other  countries  and  other  times.  Wars, 
famine,  pestilence ;  the  world  had  done  with  them.  Nations, 
kings  and  people,  politics,  were  for  Joan  throughout  all  her 
schooldays  no  more  than  scenery  for  her  unending  private 
personal  romance. 

But  because  much  has  been  told  here  of  Joan's  reveries  it 
is  not  to  be  imagined  that  she  was  addicted  to  brooding.  It 
was  only  when  her  mind  was  unoccupied  that  the  internal 
story-teller  got  to  work.  Usually  Joan  was  pretty  actively 
occupied.  The  Highmorton  ideal  of  breezy  activity  took 
hold  of  her  very  early;  one  kept  "on  the  Go."  In  school 
she  liked  her  work,  even  though  her  unworshipping  disposi- 
tion got  her  at  times  at  loggerheads  with  her  teachers ;  there 
was  so  much  more  in  the  lessons  than  there  had  been  at  Miss 
Murgatroyd 's.  Out  of  school  she  became  rather  a  disorderly 
influence.  At  first  she  missed  Peter  dreadfully.  Then  she 
began  to  imitate  Peter  for  the  benefit  of  one  or  two  small 
associates  with  less  initiative  than  her  own.  Then  she  be- 
came authentically  Peter-like.  She  tried  a  mild  saga  of  her 
own  in  those  junior  days,  and  taught  her  friends  to  act  a 
part  in  it  as  Peter  had  taught  her  to  be  a  companion  of  the 
great  Bungo.  She  developed  the  same  sort  of  disposition  to 
go  up  ladders,  climb  over  walls,  try  the  fronts  of  cliffs,  go 
through  open  doors  and  try  closed  ones,  that  used  to  make 
Peter  such  agreeable  company.  Once  or  twice  she  and  a 
friend  or  so  even  got  lost  by  the  mistress  in  charge  of  a 
school  walk,  and  came  home  by  a  different  way  through  the 
outskirts  of  Broadstairs.  But  that  led  to  an  awe-inspiring 
"fuss."  Moreover,  it  took  Joan  some  years  to  grasp  the 
idea  that  the  physical  correction  of  one's  friends  is  not  lady- 
like. When  it  came  to  other  girls  she  perceived  that  Peter's 


ADOLESCENCE  297 

way  with  a  girl  was  really  a  very  good  way — better  than 
either  hauteur  or  pinching.  Holding  down,  for  instance,  or 
the  wrist  wrench. 

All  the  time  that  she  was  at  Highmorton  Joan  found  no 
friend  as  good  as  Peter.  Tel  Wymark,  with  the  freckles, 
became  important  about  Joan's  fifteenth  birthday  as  a  good 
giggling  associate,  a  person  to  sit  with  in  the  back  seats  of 
lectures  and  debates  and  tickle  to  death  with  dry  comments 
on  the  forward  proceedings.  To  turn  on  Tel  quietly  and 
slowly  and  do  a  gargoyle  face  at  her  was  usually  enough  to 
set  her  oil' — or  even  to  pull  a  straight  face  and  sit  as  if  you 
were  about  to  gargoyle.  Tel's  own  humour  was  by  no  means 
negligible,  and  she  had  a  store  of  Limericks,  the  first  Limer- 
icks Joan  had  encountered.  Joan  herself  rarely  giggled ;  on 
a  few  occasions  she  laughed  loudly,  but  for  most  comic  occa- 
sions her  laughter  was  internal,  and  so  this  disintegration  of 
Tel  by  merriment  became  a  fascinating  occupation.  It  was 
no  doubt  the  contrast  of  her  dark  restraint  that  subjected 
her  to  the  passionate  affection  of  Adela  Murchison. 

That  affair  began  a  year  or  so  before  the  friendship  with 
Tel.  Adela  was  an  abundant  white-fleshed  creature  rather 
more  than  a  year  older  than  Joan.  She  came  back  from  the 
Easter  holidays,  stage  struck,  with  her  head  full  of  Rosalind. 
She  had  seen  Miss  Lilian  McCarthy  as  Rosalind  in  As  You 
Like  it,  and  had  fallen  violently  in  love  with  her.  She  went 
over  the  play  with  Joan,  and  Joan  was  much  fascinated  by 
the  Rosalind  masquerade;  in  such  guise  Joan  Stubland  might 
well  have  met  her  king  for  the  first  time.  Then  Adela  and 
Joan  let  their  imaginations  loose  and  played  at  Shakespearian 
love-making.  They  would  get  together  upon  walks  and  steal 
apart  whenever  an  opportunity  offered.  Adela  wanted  to 
kiss  a  great  deal,  and  once  when  she  kissed  Joan  she  whis- 
pered, "It's  not  Rosalind  I  love,  not  Lillah  or  any  one  else; 
just  Joan."  Joan  kissed  her  in  return.  And  then  some- 
thing twisted  over  in  Joan's  mind  that  drove  her  to  aus- 
terity; suddenly  she  would  have  no  more  of  this  kissing,  she 
herself  could  not  have  explained  why  or  wherefore.  It  was 
the  queerest  recoil.  "We're  being  too  soppy,"  she  said  to 
Adela,  but  that  did  not  in  the  least  express  it.  Adela  be- 


298  JOAN  AND  PETER 

came  a  protesting  and  urgent  lover;  she  wrote  Joan  notes, 
she  tried  to  make  scenes,  she  demanded  Was  there  any  one 
else? 

"No,"  said  Joan.     "But  I  don't  like  all  this  rot." 

"You  did!"  said  Adela  with  ready  tears  shining  in  her 
pretty  eyes. 

"And  I  don't  now,"  said  Joan.  .  .  . 

Joan  herself  was  puzzled,  but  she  had  no  material  in  her 
mind  by  which  she  could  test  and  analyse  this  revulsion. 
She  hid  a  dark  secret  from  all  the  world,  she  hid  it  almost 
from  herself,  that  once  before,  in  the  previous  summer  holi- 
days, one  afternoon  while  she  was  staying  with  her  aunts  at 
The  Ingle-Nook,  she  had  walked  over  by  the  Cuspard  house 
on  the  way  to  Miss  Murgatroyd's.  And  she  had  met  young 
Cuspard,  grown  tall  and  quaintly  good-looking,  in  white 
flannels.  They  had  stopped  to  talk  and  sat  down  on  a  tree 
together,  and  suddenly  he  had  kissed  her.  "You're  lovely, 
Joan,"  he  said.  It  was  an  incredible  thing  to  remember,  it 
was  a  memory  so  astounding  as  to  be  obscure,  but  she  knew 
as  a  fact  that  she  had  kissed  him  again  and  had  liked  this 
kissing,  and  then  had  had  just  this  same  feeling  of  terror,  of 
enormity,  as  though  something  vast  clutched  at  her.  It  was 
fantastically  disagreeable,  not  like  a  real  disagreeable  thing, 
but  like  a  dream  disagreeable  thing.  She  resolved  that  in 
fact  it  had  not  happened,  she  barred  it  back  out  of  the  cur- 
rent of  her  thoughts,  and  it  shadowed  her  life  for  days. 

§  7 

The  modern  world  tells  the  young  a  score  of  conflicting 
stories — more  or  less  distinctly — about  every  essential  thing. 
While  men  like  Oswald  dream  of  a  culture  telling  the  young 
plainly  what  they  are  supposed  to  be  for,  what  this  or  that 
or  the  other  is  for,  the  current  method  of  instruction  about 
God  and  state  and  sex  alike  is  a  wrangle  that  never  joins 
issue.  For  every  youth  and  maiden  who  is  not  strictly  se- 
cluded or  very  stupid,  adolescence  is  a  period  of  distressful 
perplexity,  of  hidden  hypotheses,  misunderstood  hints, 
checked  urgency,  and  wild  stampedes  of  the  imagination. 
Joan's  opening  mind  was  like  some  ill-defended  country 


ADOLESCENCE  299 

across  which  armies  marched.  Came  the  School  of  St.  George 
and  the  Venerable  Bede,  led  by  Miss  Murgatroyd  and  ap- 
plauded by  Aunt  Phoebe,  baring  its  head  and  feet  and  knees, 
casting  aside  corsets,  appealing  to  nature  and  simplicity, 
professing  fearlessness,  and  telling  the  young  a  great  deal 
less  than  it  had  the  air  of  telling  them.  Came  Highmorton, 
a  bracing  wind  after  that  relaxing  atmosphere. 

But  Limpsneld  had  at  least  a  certain  honesty  in  its  lim- 
ited initiation;  Highmorton  was  comparatively  an  imposture. 
With  an  effect  of  going  right  on  beyond  all  established  things 
to  something  finer  and  newer,  Highmorton  was  really  restor- 
ing prudery  in  a  brutalized  form.  It  is  no  more  vigorous 
to  ban  a  topic  by  calling  it  "soppy"  and  waving  a  muddy 
hockey-stick  at  it  in  a  threatening  manner,  than  it  is  to  ban 
it  by  calling  it  ''improper"  and  primly  cutting  it  dead. 
There  the  topic  remains. 

A  third  influence  had  made  a  contributory  grab  at  Joan; 
Aunt  Charlotte  Sydenham's  raid  on  the  children's  education 
was  on  behalf  of  all  that  was  then  most  orthodox.  Hers  was 
indeed  the  essential  English  culture  of  the  earlier  Victorian 
age ;  a  culture  that  so  far  as  sex  went  was  pure  suppression — 
tempered  by  the  broad  hints  and  tittering  chatter  of  servants 
and  base  people.  .  .  . 

Stuck  away,  shut  in,  in  Joan's  memory,  shut  in  and  disre- 
garded as  bees  will  wax  up  and  disregard  the  decajdng  body 
of  some  foul  intruder,  were  certain  passages  with  Mrs.  Pybus. 
They  carried  an  impression  at  once  vague  and  enormous,  of 
a  fascinating  unclean  horror.  They  were  inseparably  mixed 
up  with  strange  incredulous  thoughts  of  hell  that  were  im- 
planted during  the  same  period.  Such  scenery  as  they 
needed  was  supplied  by  the  dusty,  faded  furnishings  of  the 
little  house  in  Windsor,  they  had  the  same  faintly  disagree- 
able dusty  smell  of  a  home  only  cleansed  by  stray  wipes  with 
a  duster  and  spiritless  sweeping  with  tea-leaves. 

That  period  had  been  a  dark  patch  upon  the  sunlit  fabric 
of  Joan's  life.  Over  it  all  brooded  this  Mrs.  Pybus,  frankly 
dirty  while  "doing"  her  house  in  the  morning,  then  insin- 
cerely tidy  in  the  afternoon.  She  talked  continually  to,  at, 
and  round  about  Joan.  She  was  always  talking.  She  was 
an  untimely  widow  prone  to  brood  upon  the  unpleasant  but 


300  JOAN  AND  PETER 

enormously  importunate  facts  that  married  life  had  thrust 
upon  her.  She  had  an  irresistible  desire  to  communicate  her 
experiences  with  an  air  of  wisdom.  She  had  a  certain  con- 
ceit of  wisdom.  She  had  no  sense  of  the  respect  due  to  the 
ignorance  of  childhood.  Like  many  women  of  her  class  and 
type  she  was  too  egotistical  to  allow  for  childhood. 

Never  before  had  Joan  heard  of  diseases.  Now  she  heard 
of  all  the  diseases  of  these  two  profoundly  clinical  families, 
the  Pybuses  and  the  Unwins.  The  Pybus  family  specialized 
in  cancers,  "chumors"  and  morbid  growths  generally;  one, 
but  he  was  rather  remote  and  legendary,  had  had  an  "insec' 
in  'is  'ed ' ' ;  the  distinction  of  the  Unwins  on  the  other  hand 
was  in  difficult  parturitions.  All  this  stuff  was  poured  out 
in  a  whining  monologue  in  Joan's  presence  as  Mrs.  Pybus 
busied  herself  in  the  slatternly  details  of  her  housework. 

"Two  cases  of  cancer  I've  seen  through  from  the  very 
first  pangs,"  Mrs.  Pybus  would  begin,  and  then  piously, 
"God  grant  I  never  see  a  third." 

"Whatever  you  do,  Joan,  one  thing  I  say  never  do — good 
though  Pybus  was  and  kind.  Never  marry  no  one  with  in- 
ternal cancer,  'owever  'ard  you  may  be  drove.  Indigestion, 
rheumatism,  even  a  wooden  leg  rather.  Better  a  man  that 
drinks.  I  say  it  and  I  know.  It  doesn't  make  it  any  easier, 
Joan,  to  sit  and  see  them  suffer. 

"You've  got  your  troubles  yet  to  come,  young  lady.  I 
don't  expec'  you  understand  'arf  what  I'm  telling  you.  But 
you  will  some  day.  I  sometimes  think  if  I  'adn't  been  kep' 
in  ignorance  things  might  have  been  better  for  me — all  I  bin 
called  upon  to  go  through."  That  was  the  style  of  thing. 
It  was  like  pouring  drainage  over  a  rosebud.  First  Joan 
listened  with  curiosity,  then  with  horror.  Then  unavail- 
ingly,  always  overpowered  by  a  grotesque  fascination,  she 
tried  not  to  listen.  Monstrous  fragments  got  through  to  her 
cowering  attention.  Here  were  things  for  a  little  girl  to 
carry  off  in  her  memory,  material  as  she  sickened  for  measles 
for  the  most  terrifying  and  abominable  of  dreams. 

"There's  poor  ladies  that  has  to  be  reg'lar  cut  open.  .  .  . 

"I  'ad  a  dreadful  time  when  I  married  Pybus.  Often  I 
said  to  'im  afterwards,  you  can't  complain  of  me,  Pybus. 
The  things  one  lives  through !  .  .  . 


ADOLESCENCE  301 

"  'Is  sister's  'usband  didn't  'ave  no  mercy  on  'er.  .  .  . 

"Don't  you  go  outside  this  gate,  Joan — ever.  If  one  of 
these  'ere  Tramps  should  get  hold  of  you.  .  .  .  I  've  'card  of 
a  little  girl.  ..." 

If  a  congenial  gossip  should  happen  to  drop  in  Joan  would 
be  told  to  sit  by  the  window  and  look  at  the  "nice  picture 
book" — it  was  always  that  one  old  volume  of  The  Illustrated 
London  News — while  a  talk  went  on  that  insisted  on  being 
heard,  now  dropping  to  harsh  whispers,  now  rising  louder 
after  the  assurance  of  Mrs.  Pybus : 

"Lord!     She  won't  understand  a  word  you're  saying." 

If  by  chance  Mrs.  Pybus  and  her  friend  drifted  for  a  time 
from  personal  or  consanguineous  experiences  then  they  dealt 
with  crimes.  Difficulties  in  the  disposal  of  the  body  fasci- 
nated these  ladies  even  more  than  the  pleasing  details  of  the 
act.  And  they  preferred  murders  of  women  by  men.  It 
seemed  more  natural  to  them.  .  .  . 

The  world  changed  again.  Through  the  tossing  distress 
of  the  measles  Aunt  Phyllis  reappeared,  and  then  came  a 
journey  and  The  Ingle-Nook  and  dear  Petah !  and  Nobby. 
She  was  back  in  a  world  where  Mrs.  Pybus  could  not  exist, 
where  the  things  of  which  Mrs.  Pybus  talked  could  not  hap- 
pen. Yet  there  was  this  in  Joan's  mind,  unformulated, 
there  was  a  passionate  stress  against  its  formulation,  that  all 
the  other  things  she  thought  about  love  and  beauty  were 
poetry  and  dreaming,  but  this  alone  of  all  the  voices  that 
had  spoken  over  and  about  her,  told  of  something  real.  In 
the  unknown  beyond  to  which  one  got  if  one  pressed  on, 
was  something  of  that  sort,  something  monstrous,  painful  and 
dingy.  .  .  . 

Reality ! 

Wax  it  over,  little  dream  bees;  cover  it  up;  don't  think 
of  it!  Back  to  reverie!  Be  a  king's  mistress,  clad  in  ar- 
mour, who  sometimes  grants  a  kiss. 

§  8 

It  was  in  the  nature  of  Mrs.  Pybus  to  misconceive  things. 
She  never  grasped  the  true  relationship  of  Joan  and  Peter ; 
Mr.  Grimes  had  indeed  been  deliberately  vague  upon  that 


302  JOAN  AND  PETER 

point  in  the  interests  of  the  Sydenham  family,  the  use  of  the 
Stubland  surname  for  Joan  had  helped  him;  and  so  there 
dropped  into  Joan's  ears  a  suggestion  that  was  at  the  time 
merely  perplexing  but  which  became  gradually  an  estab- 
lished fact  in  her  mind. 

"Ow!  don't  you  know?"  said  Mrs.  Pybus  to  her  friend. 
"Ow,  no!  She's "  (Her  voice  sank  to  a  whisper.) 

For  a  time  what  they  said  was  so  confidential  as  to  convey 
nothing  to  Joan  but  a  sense  of  mystery.  "Ow  'is  mother 
ever  stood  'er  in  the  'ouse  passes  my  belief,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus, 
coming  up  to  the  audible  again.  ' '  Why !  I  'd  'ave  killed  'er. 
But  ladies  and  gentlemen  don't  seem  to  'ave  no  natural  affec- 
tions— not  wot  /  call  affections.  There  she  was  brought  into 
the  'ouse  and  treated  just  as  if  she  was  the  little  chap's 
sister." 

"She'd  be ?"  said  the  friend,  trying  to  grasp  it. 

"  'Arf  sister,"  said  Mrs.  Pybus.  "Of  a  sort.  Neither 
'ere  nor  there,  so  to  speak.  Not  in  the  eyes  of  the  law.  And 
there  they  are — leastways  they  was  until  Lady  Charlotte 
Sydenham  interfered. ' ' 

The  friend  nodded  her  head  rapidly  to  indicate  intelligent 
appreciation. 

"It  isn't  like  being  reely  brother  and  sister,"  said  Mrs. 
Pybus,  contemplating  possibilities.  "It's  neither  one  tiling 
nor  another.  And  all  wrop  up  in  mystery  as  you  might  say. 
"Why,  oo  knows?  They  might  go  falling  in  love  with  each 
other." 

"  'Orrible!"  said  Mrs.  Pybus's  friend. 

' '  It  'ad  to  be  put  a  stop  to, ' '  said  Mrs.  Pybus. 

Confirmatory  nodding,  with  a  stern  eye  for  the  little  figure 
that  sat  in  a  corner  and  pretended  to  be  interested  in  the 
faded  exploits  of  vanished  royalties,  recorded  in  that  old 
volume  of  The  Illustrated  London  News.  .  .  . 

That  conversation  sank  down  into  the  deeps  of  Joan's 
memory  and  remained  there,  obscured  but  exercising  a  dim 
influence  upon  her  relations  with  Peter.  One  phrase  sent  up 
a  bubble  every  now  and  then  into  her  conscious  thoughts: 
"half-sister."  It  was  years  after  that  she  began  to  piece 
together  the  hidden  riddle  of  her  birth.  Mummy  and  Daddy 
were  away ;  that  had  served  as  well  for  her  as  for  Peter  far 


ADOLESCENCE  303 

beyond  the  Limpsfield  days.  It  isn't  until  children  are  in 
their  teens  that  these  things  interest  them  keenly.  It  wasn't 
a  thing  to  talk  about,  she  knew,  but  it  was  a  thing  to  puzzle 
over.  Who  was  really  her  father?  Who  was  her  mother? 
If  she  was  Peter's  half-sister,  then  either  his  father  was  not 
hers  or  his  mother.  .  .  . 

When  people  are  all  manifestly  in  a  plot  to  keep  one  in  the 
dark  one  does  not  ask  questions. 

§  9 

After  the  first  violent  rupture  that  Mr.  Grimes  had  organ- 
ized, Joan  and  Peter  parted  and  met  again  in  a  series  of 
separations  and  resumptions.  They  went  off  to  totally  dis- 
similar atmospheres,  Joan  to  the  bracing  and  roughening  air 
of  Highmorton  and  Peter  first  to  the  brightness  of  White 
Court  and  then  to  the  vigorous  work  and  play  of  Caxton ;  and 
each  time  they  returned  for  the  holidays  to  Margate  or 
Limpsfield  or  Pelham  Ford  changed,  novel,  and  yet  pro- 
foundly familiar.  Always  at  first  when  holidays  brought 
them  together  again  they  were  shy  with  each  other  and  in- 
tensely egotistical,  anxious  to  show  off  their  new  tricks  and 
make  the  most  of  whatever  small  triumphs  school  life  had 
given  them.  Then  in  a  day  or  so  they  would  be  at  their  ease 
together  like  a  joint  that  has  been  dislocated  and  has  slipped 
into  place  again.  Cambridge  at  last  brought  them  nearer 
together,  and  ended  this  series  of  dislocations.  After  much 
grave  weighing  of  the  situation  by  Miss  Fairchild,  the  prin- 
cipal of  Newton  Hall,  Peter,  when  Joan  came  up,  was  given 
the  status  of  a  full  brother. 

They  grew  irregularly,  and  that  made  some  quaint  varia- 
tions of  relationship.  Peter,  soon  after  he  went  to  Caxton, 
fell  to  expanding  enormously.  He  developed  a  chest,  his 
limbs  became  great  things.  There  was  a  summer  bitten  into 
Joan's  memory  when  he  regarded  her  as  nothing  more  than 
a  "leetle  teeny  female  tick,"  and  descanted  on  the  minute- 
ness of  her  soul  and  body.  But  he  had  lost  some  of  his  light- 
ness, if  none  of  his  dexterity  and  balance,  as  a  climber,  and 
Joan  got  her  consolations  among  the  lighter  branches  of  vari- 
ous trees  they  explored.  Next  Christmas  Joan  herself  had 


304  JOAN  AND  PETER 

done  some  serious  growing,  and  the  gap  was  not  so  wide. 
But  it  was  only  after  her  first  term  at  Newnham  that  Joan 
passed  from  the  subservience  of  a  junior  to  the  confidence  of 
a  senior.  She  did  it  at  a  bound.  She  met  him  one  day  in 
the  narrow  way  between  Sidney  Street  and  Petty  Cury. 
Her  hair  was  up  and  her  eyes  were  steady ;  most  of  her  legs 
had  vanished,  and  she  had  clothes  like  a  real  woman.  We 
do  not  foregather  even  with  foster  brothers  in  the  streets  of 
Cambridge,  but  a  passing  hail  is  beyond  the  reach  of  disci- 
pline. "Hullo,  Petah!"  she  said,  "what  a  gawky  great 
thing  you're  getting!" 

Peter,  a  man  in  his  second  year,  was  so  taken  aback  he  had 
no  adequate  reply. 

"You've  grown  too,"  he  said,  "if  it  comes  to  that"; — a 
flavourless  reply.  And  there  was  admiration  in  his  eyes. 

An  encounter  for  subsequent  regrets.  He  thought  over  it 
afterwards.  The  cheek  of  her !  It  made  his  blood  boil. 

"So  long,  Petah,"  said  Joan,  carrying  it  off  to  the  end.  .  .  . 

They  were  sterner  than  brother  and  sister  with  each  other. 
There  was  never  going  to  be  anything  "soppy"  between 
them.  At  fourteen,  when  Peter  passed  into  the  Red  Indian 
phase  of  a  boy's  development,  when  there  can  be  no  more 
"blubbing,"  no  more  shirking,  he  carried  Joan  with  him. 
She  responded  magnificently  to  the  idea  of  pluck.  Spartan 
ideals  ruled  them  both.  And  a  dark  taciturnity.  Joan 
would  have  died  with  shame  if  Peter  had  penetrated  the 
secret  romance  of  Joan  Stubland,  and  the  days  of  Peter's 
sagas  were  over  for  ever.  When  Peter  was  fifteen  he  was 
consumed  by  a  craving  for  a  gun,  and  Oswald  gave  him  one. 
"But  kill,"  said  Oswald.  "If  you  let  anything  get  away 
wounded " 

Peter  took  Joan  out  into  the  wood  at  the  back.  He  missed 
a  pigeon,  and  then  he  got  one. 

"Pick  it  up,  Joan,"  he  said,  very  calmly  and  grandly. 

Joan  was  white  to  the  lips,  but  she  picked  up  the  blood- 
stained bird  in  silence.  These  things  had  to  happen. 

Then  out  of  a  heap  of  leaves  in  front  darted  a  rabbit.  Lop, 
lop,  lop,  went  its  little  white  scut.  Bang!  and  over  it  rolled, 
but  it  wasn't  instantly  killed.  Horror  came  upon  Joan. 
She  was  nearest ;  she  ran  to  the  wretched  animal,  which  was 


ADOLESCENCE  305 

lying  on  its  side  and  kicking  automatically,  and  stood  over  it. 
Its  eyes  were  bright  and  wide  with  terror.  "Oh,  how  am  I 
to  kill  it?"  she  cried,  with  agony  in  her  voice;  "what  am  I 
to  do-o?"  She  wrung  her  hands.  She  felt  she  was  going 
to  pieces,  giving  herself  away,  failing  utterly.  Peter  would 
despise  her  and  jeer  at  her.  But  the  poor  little  beast !  The 
poor  beast!  There  is  a  limit  to  pride.  She  caught  it  up. 
"Petah!"  she  cried  quite  pitifully,  on  the  verge  of  a  whim- 
per. 

Peter  had  come  up  to  her.  He  didn't  look  contemptuous. 
He  was  white-lipped  too.  She  had  never  seen  him  look 
scared  before.  He  snatched  the  rabbit  from  her  and  killed 
it  by  one,  two,  three — she  counted — quick  blows — she  didn't 
see.  But  she  had  met  his  eyes,  and  they  were  as  distressed 
as  hers.  Just  for  a  moment. 

Then  he  was  a  fifth  form  boy  again.  He  examined  his 
victim  with  an  affectation  of  calm.  "Too  far  back,"  he  said. 
"Bad  shot.  Mustn't  do  that  again."  .  .  . 

The  rabbit  was  quite  still  and  limp  now,  dangling  from 
Peter's  hand,  its  eye  had  glazed,  blood  dripped  and  clotted 
at  its  muz/le,  but  its  rhythmic  desperate  kicking  was  still 
beating  in  Joan's  brain. 

Was  this  to  go  on  ?     Could  she  go  on  ? 

Peter's  gun  and  the  pigeon  were  lying  some  yards  away. 
He  regarded  them  and  then  looked  down  at  the  rabbit  he  held. 

"Now  I  know  I  can  shoot,"  he  said,  and  left  the  sentence 
unfinished. 

"Bring  the  pigeon,  Joan,"  he  said,  ending  an  indecision, 
and  picked  up  his  gun  and  led  the  way  back  towards  the 
house.  .  .  . 

"We  got  a  pigeon  and  a  rabbit,"  Joan  babbled  at  tea  to 
Oswald.  "Next  time,  Petah's  going  to  let  me  have  the  gun." 

Our  tone  was  altogether  sporting. 

But  there  was  no  next  time.  There  were  many  unspoken 
things  between  Joan  and  Peter,  and  this  was  to  be  one  of 
them.  For  all  the  rest  of  their  lives  neither  Joan  nor  Peter 
went  shooting  again.  Men  Peter  was  destined  to  slay — but 
no  more  beasts.  Necessity  never  compelled  them,  and  it 
would  have  demanded  an  urgent  necessity  before  they  would 
have  faced  the  risk  of  seeing  another  little  furry  creature 


306  JOAN  AND  PETER 

twist  and  wriggle  and  of  marking  how  a  bright  eye  glazes 
over.  But  they  were  both  very  bitterly  ashamed  of  this  dis- 
tressing weakness.  They  left  further  shooting  for  "tomor- 
row," and  it  remained  always  tomorrow.  They  said  nothing 
about  their  real  feelings  in  the  matter,  and  Peter  cleaned  and 
oiled  his  new  gun  very  carefully  and  hung  it  up  conspicu- 
ously over  the  mantelshelf  of  their  common  room,  ready  to  be 
taken  down  at  any  time — when  animals  ceased  to  betray 
feeling. 

§  10 

Joan  and  Peter  detested  each  other's  friends  from  the 
beginning.  The  quarrel  that  culminated  in  that  amazing 
speech  of  Joan's,  had  been  smouldering  between  them  for  a 
good  seven  years.  It  went  right  back  to  the  days  when  they 
were  still  boy  and  girl. 

To  begin  with,  after  their  first  separation  they  had  had  no 
particular  friends;  they  had  had  acquaintances  and  habits  of 
association,  but  the  mind  still  lacks  the  continuity  necessary 
for  friendship  and  Euclid  until  the  early  teens.  The  first 
rift  came  with  Adela  Murchison.  Joan  brought  her  for  the 
summer  holidays  when  Peter  had  been  just  a  year  at  Caxton. 

That  was  the  first  summer  at  Pelham  Ford.  Aunt  Phyllis 
was  with  them,  but  Aunt  Phcebe  was  in  great  labour  with  her 
first  and  only  novel,  a  fantasia  on  the  theme  of  feminine 
genius,  "These  are  my  Children,  or  Mary  on  the  Cross." 
(It  was  afterwards  greatly  censored.  Boots,  the  druggist 
librarian,  would  have  none  of  it.)  She  stayed  alone,  there- 
fore, at  The  Ingle-Nook,  writing,  revising,  despairing,  tearing 
up  and  beginning  again,  reciting  her  more  powerful  passages 
to  the  scarlet  but  listening  ears  of  Groombridge  and  the  little 
maid,  and  going  more  and  more  unkempt,  unhooked,  and 
unbuttoned.  Oswald,  instead  of  resorting  to  the  Climax 
Club  as  he  was  apt  to  do  when  Aunt  Phcebe  was  imminent, 
abode  happily  in  his  new  home. 

Adela  was  a  month  or  so  older  than  Peter  and,  what  an- 
noyed him  to  begin  with,  rather  more  fully  grown.  She 
was,  as  she  only  too  manifestly  perceived,  a  woman  of  the 
world  in  comparison  with  both  of  her  hosts.  She  was  still 
deeply  in  love  with  Joan,  but  by  no  means  indifferent  to  this 


ADOLESCENCE  307 

dark  boy  who  looked  at  her  with  so  much  of  Joan's  cool 
detachment. 

Joan's  romantic  dreams  were  Joan's  inmost  secret, 
Adela's  romantic  intentions  were  an  efflorescence.  She  was 
already  hoisting  the  signals  for  masculine  surrender.  She 
never  failed  to  have  a  blue  ribbon  astray  somewhere  to  mark 
and  help  the  blueuess  of  her  large  blue  eyes.  She  insisted 
upon  the  flaxen  waves  over  her  ears,  and  secretly  assisted  them 
to  kink.  She  had  a  high  colour.  She  had  no  rouge  yet  in 
her  possession  but  there  was  rouge  in  her  soul,  and  she  would 
rub  her  cheeks  with  her  hands  before  she  came  into  a  room. 
She  discovered  to  Joan  the  incredible  fact  that  Oswald  was 
also  a  man. 

"With  her  arm  round  Joan 's  waist  or  over  her  shoulder  she 
would  look  back  at  him  across  the  lawn. 

"1  say,"  she  said,  "he'd  be  frightfully  good-looking — if 
it  wasn't  for  that." 

And  one  day,  "I  wonder  if  Mr.  Sydenham's  ever  been  in 
love." 

She  lay  in  wait  for  Oswald's  eye.  She  went  after  him  to 
ask  him  unimportant  things. 

Once  or  twice  little  things  happened,  the  slightest  things, 
but  it  might  have  seemed  to  Joan  that  Oswald  was  disposed  to 
flirt  with  Adela.  But  that  was  surely  impossible.  .  .  . 

The  first  effect  of  the  young  woman  upon  Peter  was  a 
considerable  but  indeterminate  excitement.  It  was  neither 
pleasurable  nor  unpleasurable,  but  it  hung  over  the  giddy 
verge  of  being  unpleasant.  It  made  him  want  to  be  very 
large,  handsome  and  impressive.  It  also  made  him  acutely 
ashamed  of  wanting  to  be  very  large,  handsome  and  impres- 
sive. It  turned  him  from  a  simple  boy  into  a  conflict  of 
motives.  He  wanted  to  extort  admiration  from  Adela.  Also 
he  wanted  to  despise  her  utterly.  These  impulses  worked 
out  to  no  coherent  system  of  remarks  and  gestures,  and  he 
became  awkward  and  tongue-tied. 

Adela  wanted  to  be  shown  all  over  the  house  and  garden. 
She  put  her  arm  about  Joan  in  a  manner  Peter  thought  of- 
fensive. Then  she  threw  back  her  hair  at  him  over  her 
shoulder  and  said,  shooting  a  glance  at  him,  "You  come 
too." 


308  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Cheek! 

Still,  she  was  a  guest,  and  so  a  fellow  had  to  follow  with 
his  hands  in  his  pockets  and  watch  his  own  private  and  par- 
ticular Joan  being  ordered  about  and — what  was  somehow  so 
much  more  exasperating — pawed  about. 

At  what  seemed  to  be  the  earliest  opportunity  Peter  ex- 
cused himself,  and  went  off  to  the  outhouse  in  which  he  had 
his  tools  and  chemicals  and  things.  He  decided  he  would  rig 
up  everything  ready  to  make  Sulphuretted  Hydrogen — al- 
though he  knew  quite  well  that  this  was  neither  a  large, 
handsome,  nor  impressive  thing  to  do.  And  then  he  would 
wait  for  them  to  come  along,  and  set  the  odour  going. 

But  neither  of  the  girls  came  near  his  Glory  Hole,  and  he 
was  not  going  to  invite  them.  He  just  hovered  there  un- 
visited,  waiting  with  his  preparations  and  whistling  soft 
melancholy  tunes.  Finally  he  made  a  lot  of  the  gas,  simply 
because  he  had  got  the  stuff  ready,  and  stank  himself  out  of 
his  Glory  Hole  into  society  again. 

At  supper,  which  had  become  a  sort  of  dinner  that  night, 
Adela  insisted  on  talking  like  a  rather  languid,  smart  woman 
of  the  world  to  Nobby.  Nobby  took  her  quite  seriously.  It 
was  perfectly  sickening. 

"D'you  hunt  much?"  said  Adela. 

"Not  in  England,"  said  Nobby.  "There's  too  many 
hedges  for  me.  I've  a  sailor's  seat." 

"All  my  people  hunt,"  said  Adela.  "It's  rather  a  bore, 
don't  you  think,  Mr.  Sydenham?" 

Talk  like  that ! 

Two  clays  passed,  during  which  Peter  was  either  being 
bored  to  death  in  the  company  of  Adela  and  Joan  or  also 
bored  to  death  keeping  aloof  from  them.  He  cycled  to  'Ware 
with  them,  and  Adela 's  cycle  had  a  change  speed  arrange- 
ment with  a  high  gear  of  eighty-five  that  made  it  difficult  to 
keep  ahead  of  her.  Beast ! 

And  on  the  second  evening  she  introduced  a  new  card  game, 
Demon  Patience,  a  scrambling  sort  of  game  in  which  you 
piled  on  aces  in  the  middle  and  cried  ' '  Stop ! "  as  soon  as  your 
stack  was  out.  It  was  one  of  those  games,  one  of  those  in- 
ferior games,  at  which  boys  in  their  teens  are  not  nearly  as 
quick  as  girls,  Peter  discovered.  But  presently  Joan  began 


ADOLESCENCE  309 

to  pull  ahead  and  beat  Adela  and  Peter.  The  two  girls 
began  to  play  against  each  other  as  if  his  poor  little  spurts 
didn't  amount  to  anything.  They  certainly  didn't  amount 
to  very  much. 

Adela  began  to  play  with  a  sprawling  eagerness.  Her 
colour  deepened;  her  manners  deteriorated.  She  was  tor- 
mented between  ambition  and  admiration.  When  Joan  had 
run  her  out  for  the  third  time,  she  cried,  "Oh,  Joan,  you 
Wonderful  Darling!" 

And  clutched  and  kissed  her !  .  .  . 

All  the  other  things  might  have  been  bearable  if  it  had 
not  been  for  this  perpetual  confabulating  with  Joan,  this 
going  off  to  whisper  with  Joan,  this  putting  of  arms  round 
Joan's  neck,  this  whispering  that  was  almost  kissing  Joan's 
ear.  One  couldn't  have  a  moment  with  Joan.  One  couldn't 
use  Joan  for  the  slightest  thing.  It  would  have  been  better 
if  one  hadn't  had  a  Joan. 

On  the  mill-pond  there  was  a  boat  that  Joan  and  Peter 
were  allowed  to  use.  On  the  morning  of  the  fifth  day  Joan 
found  Peter  hanging  about  in  the  hall. 

'Moan." 

' '  Yes  ? ' ' 

"Come  and  muck  about  in  Baker's  boat." 

"If  Adela " 

"Oh,  leave  Adela!  We  don't  want  her.  She'd  stash  it 
all  up." 

' '  But  she 's  a  visitor ! ' ' 

"Pretty  rotten  visitor !  What  did  you  bring  her  here  for? 
She's  rotten." 

"She's  not.  She's  all  right.  You're  being  horrid  rude 
to  her.  Every  chance  you  get.  I  like  her." 

"Silly  tick,  she  is!"' 

"She's  taller  than  you  are,  anyhow." 

"Nyar  Nyar  Nyar  Nyar,"  said  Peter  in  a  singularly  inef- 
fective mockery  of  Adela 's  manner.  Adela  appeared,  de- 
scending the  staircase.  Peter  turned  away. 

"Peter  wants  to  go  in  the  boat  on  the  mill-pond,"  said 
Joan,  as  if  with  calculated  wickedness. 

"Oh!  I  love  boats!"  said  Adela. 

What  was  a  chap  to  do  but  go  ? " 


310  JOAN  AND  PETER 

But  under  a  thin  mask  of  playfulness  Peter  splashed  them 
both  a  lot — especially  Adela.  And  in  the  evening  he  re- 
fused to  play  at  Demon  Patience  and  went  and  sat  by  him- 
self to  draw.  He  tried  various  designs.  He  was  rather  good 
at  drawing  Mr.  Henderson,  and  he  did  several  studies  of 
him.  Then  the  girls,  who  found  Demon  Patience  slow  with 
only  two  players,  came  and  sat  beside  him.  He  was  inspired 
to  begin  an  ugly  caricature  of  Adela. 

He  began  at  the  eyes. 

Joan  knew  him  better  than  Adela.  She  saw  what  was  com- 
ing. Down  came  her  little  brown  paw  on  the  paper.  "No, 
you  don't,  Petah,"  she  said. 

Peter  looked  into  her  face,  hot  against  his,  and  there  was 
a  red  light  in  his  eyes. 

"Leago,  Joan,"  he  said. 

A  struggle  began  in  which  Adela  took  no  share. 

The  Sydeuham  blood  is  hot  blood,  and  though  it  doesn't 
like  hurting  rabbits  it  can  be  pretty  rough  with  its  first 
cousins.  But  Joan  was  still  gripping  the  crumpled  half  of 
the  offending  sheet  when  Aunt  Phyllis,  summoned  by  a  scared 
Adela,  came  in.  The  two  were  on  the  hearthrug,  panting, 
and  Joan 's  teeth  were  deep  in  Peter 's  wrist ;  they  parted  and 
rose  somewhat  abashed.  "My  dears!"  cried  Aunt  Phyllis. 

"We  were  playing,"  said  Joan,  flushed  and  breathless, 
but  honourably  tearless. 

"Yes,"  said  Peter,  holding  his  wrist  tight.  "We  were 
playing." 

"Romping,"  said  Aunt  Phyllis.  "Weren't  you  a  little 
rough?  Adela,  you  know,  isn't  used  to  your  style.  ..." 

After  that,  Peter  shunned  further  social  intercourse.  He 
affected  a  great  concentration  upon  experimental  chemistry 
and  photography,  and  bicycled  in  lonely  pride  to  Waltham 
Cross,  Baklock,  and  Dunmow.  He  gave  himself  up  to  the 
roads  of  Hertfordshire.  When  at  last  Adela  departed  it 
made  no  difference  in  his  aloofness.  Joan  was  henceforth  as 
nothing  to  him ;  she  was  just  a  tick,  a  silly  little  female  tick, 
an  associate  of  things  that  went  "Nyar  Nyar  Nyar."  He 
hated  her.  At  least,  he  would  have  hated  her  if  there  was 
anything  that  a  self-respecting  Caxtonian  could  hate  in  a 
being  so  utterly  contemptible.  (Yet  at  the  bottom  of  his 


ADOLESCENCE  311 

heart  he  loved  and  respected  her  for  biting  his  wrist  so 
hard.) 

Deprived  of  Adela,  Joan  became  very  lonely  and  forlorn. 
After  some  days  there  were  signs  of  relenting  on  the  part  of 
Peter,  and  then  came  his  visitor,  Wilmington,  a  boy  who  had 
gone  with  him  from  White  Court  to  Caxton,  and  after  that 
there  was  no  need  of  Joan.  With  a  grim  resolution  Peter 
shut  Joan  out  from  all  their  pursuits.  She  was  annihilated. 

The  boys  did  experimental  chemistry  together,  made  the 
most  disgusting  stinks,  blew  up  a  small  earthwork  by  means 
of  a  mine,  and  stained  their  hands  bright  yellow;  they  had 
long  bicycle  rides  together,  they  did  "splorjums"  in  the 
wood,  they  "mucked  about"  with  Baker's  boat.  Joan  by 
no  effort  could  come  into  existence  again.  Once  or  twice  as 
Peter  was  going  off  with  Wilmington,  Peter  would  glance 
back  and  feel  a  gleam  of  compunction  at  the  little  figure  that 
watched  him  going.  But  she  had  her  Adelas.  She  and 
Adela  wrote  letters  to  each  other.  She  could  go  and  write 
to  her  beastly  Adela  now.  .  .  . 

"Can't  Joan  come?"  said  Wilmington. 

"She's  only  a  tick,"  said  Peter. 

"She's  not  a  bad  sort  of  tick,"  said  Wilmington. 

(What  business  was  it  of  his?) 

Joan  fell  back  on  Nobby,  and  went  for  walks  with  him  in 
the  afternoon. 

Then  came  a  complication.  Towards  the  end  Wilmington 
got  quite  soppy  on  Joan.  It  showed. 

Aunt  Phyllis  suggested  charades  for  the  evening  hour  after 
dinner.  Wilmington  and  Peter  played  against  each  other, 
and  either  of  them  took  out  any  people  he  wanted  to  act  with 
him.  Aunt  Phyllis  was  a  grave  and  dignified  actress  and 
Nobby  could  do  better  than  you  might  have  expected.  Peter 
did  Salome.  (Sal — owe — me;  doing  sal  volatile  for  Sal.) 
He  sat  as  Herod,  crowned  and  scornful  with  the  false  black 
beard,  and  Joan  danced  and  afterwards  brought  the  football 
in  on  a  plate.  Aunt  Phyllis  did  pseudo-oriental  music. 
But  when  Wilmington  saw  Joan  dance  he  knew  what  it  was 
to  be  in  love.  He  sat  glowering  passion.  For  a  time  he 
remained  frozen  rigid,  and  then  broke  into  wild  hand-clap- 
ping. His  ears  were  bright  red,  and  Aunt  Phyllis  looked  at 


312  JOAN  AND  PETER 

him  curiously.  It  was  with  difficulty  that  his  clouded  mind 
could  devise  a  charade  that  would  give  him  a  call  upon  Joan. 
But  he  thought  at  last  of  Milton.  (Mill — tun.) 

"I  want  you,"  he  said. 

"Won't  Aunty  do?" 

' '  No,  you.     It 's  got  to  be  a  girl. ' ' 

He  held  the  door  open  for  her,  and  stumbled  going  out  of 
the  room.  He  was  more  breathless  and  jerky  than  ever  out- 
side. Joan  heard  his  exposition  with  an  unfriendly  expres- 
sion. 

"And  what  am  I  to  do  then?"  she  asked.  .  .  . 

"And  then?  .  .  ." 

They  did  "Mill"  and  "Tun"  pretty  badly.  Came  Wil- 
mington's last  precious  moments  with  her.  He  broke  off  in 
his  description  of  Milton  blind  and  Joan  as  the  amanuensis 
daughter.  "Joan,"  he  whispered,  going  hoarse  with  emo- 
tion. "Joan,  you're  lovely.  I'd  die  for  you." 

A  light  of  evil  triumph  came  into  Joan's  eyes. 

"Ugly  thing!"  said  Joan,  "what  did  you  come  here  for? 
You've  spoilt  my  holidays.  Let  go  of  my  hand!  .  .  .  Let's 
go  in  and  do  our  tableau." 

And  afterwards  when  Wilmington  met  Joan  in  the  pass- 
age she  treated  him  to  a  grimace  that  was  only  too  manifestly 
intended  to  represent  his  own  expression  of  melancholy  but 
undying  devotion.  In  the  presence  of  others  she  was  coolly 
polite  to  him. 

Peter  read  his  friend  like  a  book,  but  refrained  from  in- 
jurious comment,  and  Wilmington  departed  in  a  state  of 
grave  nervous  disarray. 

A  day  passed.  There  was  not  much  left  now  of  the 
precious  holidays.  Came  a  glowing  September  morning. 

"Joe-un,"  whooped  Peter  in  the  garden — in  just  the  old 
note. 

' '  Pee-tah ! ' '  answered  Joan,  full-voiced  as  ever,  distant 
but  drawing  nearer. 

"Come  and  muck  about  in  Baker's  boat." 

"Right-o,  Petah!"  said  Joan,  and  approached  with  a 
slightly  prancing  gait. 


ADOLESCENCE  313 

§  11 

Growing  out  of  his  Red  Indian  phase  Peter  moved  up 
into  the  Lower  Sixth  and  became  a  regular  cynical  man  of 
the  world  with  an  air  of  knowing  more  than  a  thing  or  two. 
He  was,  in  fact,  learning  a  vast  number  of  things  that  are 
outside  the  books ;  and  rearranging  many  of  his  early  shocks 
and  impressions  by  the  help  of  a  confusing  and  increasing 
mixture  of  half-lights.  The  chaotic  disrespect  of  the  young 
went  out  of  his  manner  in  his  allusion  to  school  affairs,  he 
no  longer  spoke  of  various  masters  as  "Buzzy,"  "Snooks," 
and  "the  Croker,"  and  a  curious  respectability  had  invaded 
his  demeanour.  The  Head  had  had  him  in  to  tea  and  ten- 
nis. The  handle  of  the  prefect's  birch  was  perhaps  not 
more  than  a  year  now  from  his  grip,  if  he  bore  himself 
gravely.  He  reproached  Joan  on  various  small  occasions  for 
"thundering  bad  form,"  and  when  Wilmington  came,  a 
much  more  wary  and  better-looking  Wilmington  with  his 
heart  no  longer  on  his  sleeve,  the  conversation  became,  so  to 
speak,  political.  They  talked  at  the  dinner-table  of  the 
behaviour  of  so-and-so  and  this-and-that  at  "High"  and  at 
"Bottoms"  and  on  "the  Corso";  they  discussed  various  cases 
of  "side"  and  "cheek,"  and  the  permanent  effect  of  these 
upon  the  standing  and  reputations  of  the  youths  concerned; 
they  were  earnest  to  search  out  and  know  utterly  why  Best 
did  not  get  his  colours  and  whether  it  was  just  to  "super" 
old  Rawdon.  They  discussed  the  question  of  superannuation 
with  Oswald  very  gravely.  ' '  Don 't  you  think, ' '  said  Oswald, 
"if  a  school  takes  a  boy  on,  it  ought  to  see  him  through?" 

"But  if  he  doesn't  work,  sir?"  said  Wilmington. 

"A  school  oughtn't  to  produce  that  lassitude,"  said  Os- 
wald. 

"A  chap  ought  to  use  a  school,"  said  Peter. 

That  was  a  new  point  of  view  to  Oswald  and  Joan. 

Afterwards  came  Troop,  a  larger  boy  than  either  Peter  or 
Wilmington,  a  prefect,  a  youth  almost  incredibly  manly  in 
his  manner,  and  joined  on  to  these  discussions.  Said  Os- 
wald, "There  ought  not  to  be  such  a  thing  as  superannua- 
tion. A  man  ought  not  to  be  let  drift  to  the  point  of  un- 
teachable  incapacity.  And  then  thrown  away.  Some  mas- 


314  JOAN  AND  PETER 

ter  ought  to  have  shepherded  him  in  for  special  treatment." 

"They  don't  look  after  us  to  that  extent,  sir,"  said  Troop. 

"Don't  they  teach  you?     Or  fail  to  teach  you?" 

"It's  the  school  teaches  us,"  said  Peter,  as  though  it  iiad 
just  occurred  to  him. 

"Still,  the  masters  are  there,"  said  Oswald,  smiling. 

"The  masters  are  there,"  Troop  acquiesced.  "But  the 
life  of  the  school  is  the  tradition.  And  a  big  chap  like 
Kavvdon  hanging  about,  too  big  to  lick  and  too  stupid  for 
responsibility it  breaks  things  up,  sir." 

Oswald  was  very  much  interested  in  this  prefect's  view  of 
the  school  life.  Behind  his  blank  mask  he  engendered  ques- 
tions; his  one  eye  watched  Troop  and  went  from  Troop  to 
Peter.  This  manliness  in  the  taught  surprised  him  tre- 
mendously. Peter  was  acquiring  it  rapidly,  but  Troop 
seemed  to  embody  it.  Oswald  himself  had  been  a  man  early 
enough  and  had  led  a  hard  life  of  mutual  criticism  and  ex- 
asperation with  his  fellows,  but  that  had  been  in  a  working 
reality,  the  navy;  this,  he  reflected,  was  a  case  of  cocks  crow- 
ing inside  the  egg.  These  boys  were  living  in  a  premature 
autonomous  state,  an  aristocratic  republic  with  the  Head  as 
a  sort  of  constitutional  monarch.  There  was  one  question- 
able consequence  at  least.  They  were  acquiring  political 
habits  before  they  had  acquired  wide  horizons.  Were  the 
political  habits  of  a  school  where  all  the  boys  were  of  one 
race  and  creed  and  class,  suitable  for  the  problems  of  a 
world's  affairs? 

Troop,  under  Oswald's  insidious  leading,  displayed  his 
ideas  modestly  but  frankly,  and  they  were  the  ideas  of  a 
large  child.  Troop  was  a  good-looking,  thoroughly  healthy 
youth,  full  of  his  grave  responsibilities  towards  the  school 
and  inclined  to  claim  a  liberal  attitude.  He  was  very  great 
upon  his  duty  to  ' '  make  the  fellows  live  decently  and  behave 
decently."  He  was  lured  into  a  story  of  how  one  youth  with 
a  tendency  to  long  hair  had  been  partly  won  and  partly 
driven  to  a  more  seemly  coiffure;  how  he  had  dealt  with  a 
games  shirker,  and  how  a  fellow  had  been  detected 
lending  socialist  pamphlets — "not  to  his  friends,  sir,  I 
shouldn't  mind  that  so  much,  but  pushing  them  upon  any 
one" — and  restrained.  "Seditious  sort  of  stuff,  sir,  I  be- 


ADOLESCENCE  315 

lieve.  No,  I  did  not  read  it,  sir."  Troop  was  for  cold 
baths  under  all  circumstances,  for  no  smoking  under  sixteen 
and  five  foot  six,  and  for  a  simple  and  unquestioning  loyalty 
to  any  one  who  came  along  and  professed  to  be  in  authority 
over  him.  When  he  mentioned  the  king  his  voice  dropped 
worshipfully.  Upon  the  just  use  of  the  birch  Troop  was 
conscientiously  prolix.  There  were  prefects,  he  said,  who 
"savaged"  the  fellows.  Others  swished  without  judgment. 
Troop  put  conscience  into  each  whack. 

Troop's  liberalism  interested  Oswald  more  than  anything 
else  about  him.  He  was  proud  to  profess  himself  no  mere 
traditionalist;  he  wanted  Caxton  to  "broaden  down  from 
precedent  to  precedent."  Indeed  he  had  ambitions  to  be  re- 
membered as  a  reformer.  He  hoped,  he  said,  to  leave  the 
school  "better  than  he  found  it" — the  modern  note  surely. 
His  idea  of  a  great  and  memorable  improvement  was  to  let 
the  Upper  Fifth  fellows  into  the  Corso  after  morning  service 
on  Sunday.  He  did  not  think  it  would  make  them  imperti- 
nent; rather  it  would  increase  their  self-respect.  He  was 
also  inclined  to  a  reorganization  of  the  afternoon  fagging  "to 
stop  so  much  bawling  down  the  corridor."  There  ought  to 
be  a  bell — an  electric  bell — in  each  prefect's  study.  No  doubt 
that  was  a  bit  revolutionary — Troop  almost  smirked.  "It's 
all  very  well  for  schools  like  Eton  or  Winchester  to  stick  to 
the  old  customs,  sir,  but  we  are  supposed  to  be  an  Up-to-Date 
school.  Don't  you  think,  sir?"  The  egg  was  everything  to 
this  young  cockerel ;  the  world  outside  was  naught.  Oswald 
led  him  on  from  one  solemn  puerility  to  another,  and  as  the 
big  boy  talked  in  his  stout  man-of-the-world  voice,  the  red 
eye  roved  from  him  to  Peter  and  from  Peter  back  to  Troop. 
Until  presently  it  realized  that  Peter  was  watching  it  as 
narrowly.  "What  does  Peter  really  think  of  this  stuff?" 
thought  Oswald.  "What  does  Nobby  really  think  of  this 
stuff?"  queried  Peter. 

'I  suppose,  some  day,  you'll  leave  Caxton,"  said  Oswald, 
shall  be  very  sorry  to,  sir,"  said  Troop  sincerely. 

'Have  you  thought  at  all " 

'Not  yet,  sir.     At  least " 

'Troop's  people,"  Peter  intervened,  "are  Army  people." 

'I  see,"  said  Oswald. 


316  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Joan  listened  enviously  to  all  this  prefectorial  conversa- 
tion. At  Highmorton  that  sort  of  bossing  and  influencing 
was  done  by  the  junior  staff.  .  .  . 

Oswald  did  his  best  to  lure  Troop  from  his  administrative 
preoccupations  into  general  topics.  But  apparently  some 
one  whom  Troop  respected  had  warned  him  against  general 
topics.  Oswald  lugged  and  pushed  the  talk  towards  re- 
ligion, Aunt  Phyllis  helping,  but  they  came  up  against  a 
stone  wall.  "My  people  are  Church  of  England,"  said 
Troop,  intimating  thereby  that  his  opinions  were  banked  with 
the  proper  authorities.  It  was  not  for  him  to  state  them. 
And  in  regard  to  politics,  "All  my  people  are  Conservative." 
One  evening  Oswald  showed  him  a  portfolio  of  drawings 
from  various  Indian  temples,  and  suggested  something  of  the 
complex  symbolism  of  the  figures.  Troop  thought  it  was 
"rather  unhealthy."  But — turning  from  these  monstrosi- 
ties— he  had  hopes  for  India.  "My  cousin  tells  me,  sir,  that 
cricket  and  polo  are  spreading  very  rapidly  there. "  "  Polo, ' ' 
said  Oswald,  "is  an  Indian  game.  They  have  played  it  for 
centuries.  It  came  from  Persia  originally."  But  Troop 
was  unable  to  imagine  Indians  riding  horses;  he  had  the 
common  British  delusion  that  the  horse  and  the  ship  were 
both  invented  in  our  islands  and  that  all  foreign  peoples  are 
necessarily  amateurs  at  such  things.  "I  thought  they  rode 
elephants,"  said  Troop  with  quiet  conviction.  .  .  . 

Troop  was  not  only  a  great  experience  for  Oswald,  he  also 
exercised  the  always  active  mind  of  Joan  very  considerably. 

Peter,  it  seemed,  hadn't  even  mentioned  her  beforehand. 

' '  Hullo ! ' '  said  Troop  at  the  sight  of  her.     ' '  Got  a  sister  ? ' ' 

' '  Foster-sister, ' '  said  Peter,  minimizing  the  thing.  ' '  Joan, 
this  is  Troop." 

Joan  regarded  him  critically.     "Can  he  play  D.P. ?" 

"Not  one  of  my  games,"  said  Troop,  who  was  chary  of  all 
games  not  usually  played. 

"It's  a  game  like  Snap,"  said  Peter  with  an  air  of  casual 
contempt,  and  earned  a  bright  scowl. 

For  a  day  or  so  Troop  and  Joan  kept  aloof,  watching  one 
another.  Then  she  caught  him  out  rather  neatly  twice  at 
single  wicket  cricket ;  he  had  a  weakness  for  giving  catches 
to  point  and  she  had  observed  it.  "Caught!"  he  cried  ap- 


ADOLESCENCE  317 

provingly.  Also  she  snicked  and  slipped  and  at  last  slogged 
boldly  at  his  patronizing  under-arm  bowling.  "Here's  a 
Twister,"  he  said,  like  an  uncle  speaking  to  a  child. 

Joan  smacked  it  into  the  cedar.  "Twister!"  quoth  Joan, 
running. 

After  that  he  took  formal  notice  of  her,  betraying  a  dis- 
position to  address  her  as  "Kid."  (Ralph  Connor  was  at 
that  time  adding  his  quota  to  the  great  British  tradition,  it 
is  true  he  wrote  in  American  about  cowboys — but  a  refined 
cowboy  was  the  fullest  realization  of  an  English  gentleman's 
pre-war  ideals — and  Ralph  Connor's  cowboys  are  essentially 
refined.  Thence  came  the  "Kid,"  anyhow.)  But  Joan  took 
umbrage  at  the  "Kid."  And  she  disliked  Troop's  manner 
and  influence  with  Peter.  And  the  way  Peter  stood  it.  She 
did  not  understand  what  a  very,  very  great  being  a  prefect 
is  in  an  English  public  school,  she  did  not  know  of  Troop's 
superbness  at  rugger,  it  seemed  to  her  that  it  was  bad  man- 
ners to  behave  as  though  a  visit  to  Pelham  Ford  were  an  act 
of  princely  condescension.  She  was  even  disposed  to  diag- 
nose Troop's  largeness,  very  unjustly,  as  fat.  So  she  pulled 
up  Troop  venomously  with  "My  name's  not  Kit,  it's  Joan. 
J.O.A.N." 

"Sorry!"  said  Troop.  And  being  of  that  insensitive  class 
whose  passions  are  only  to  be  roused  by  a  smacking,  he  be- 
gan to  take  still  more  notice  of  her.  She  was,  he  perceived, 
a  lively  Kid.  He  felt  a  strong  desire  to  reprove  and  influ- 
ence her.  He  had  no  suspicion  that  what  he  really  wanted 
to  do  was  to  interest  Joaii  in  himself. 

Joan's  tennis  was  incurably  tricky.  Troop's  idea  of  ten- 
nis was  to  play  very  hard  and  very  swiftly  close  over  the 
net,  but  without  cunning.  Peter  and  Wilmington  followed 
his  lead.  But  Joan  forced  victory  upon  an  unwilling  part- 
ner by  doing  unexpected  things. 

Troop  declared  he  did  not  mind  being  defeated,  but  that 
he  was  shocked  by  the  spirit  of  Joan's  play.  It  wasn't 
"sporting." 

"Those  short  returns  aren't  done,  Kid,"  he  said. 

"  I  do  them, ' '  said  Joan.     ' '  Ancient. ' ' 

Peter  and  Wilmington  were  visibly  shocked,  but  Troop 
showed  no  resentment  at  the  gross  familiarity. 


318  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"But  if  every  one  did  them!"  he  reasoned. 

"I  could  take  them,"  said  Joan.  "Any  one  could  take 
them  who  knew  how." 

The  dispute  seemed  likely  to  die  down  into  unverifiable 
assertions. 

"Peter  can  take  them,"  said  Joan.  "He  drops  them  back. 
But  he  isn  't  doing  it  today. ' ' 

Peter  reflected.  Troop  would  never  understand,  but  there 
was  something  reasonable  in  Joan's  line.  "I'll  see  to  Joan," 
he  said  abruptly,  and  came  towards  the  middle  of  the  net. 

The  game  continued  on  unorthodox  but  brilliant  lines. 
"I  don't  call  this  tennis,"  said  Troop. 

"If  you  served  to  her  left,"  said  Peter. 

"But  she's  a  girl!"  protested  Troop.     "Serve!" 

He  made  the  concessions  that  are  proper  to  a  lady,  and 
Joan  scored  the  point  after  a  brief  rally  with  Peter. 
"Game,"  said  Joan. 

Troop  declared  he  did  not  care  to  play  again.  It  would 
put  him  off  tennis.  "Take  me  as  a  partner,"  said  Joan. 
"No — I  don't  think  so,  thanks,"  said  Troop  coldly. 

Every  one  became  thoughtful  and  drifted  towards  the  net. 
Oswald  approached  from  the  pergola,  considering  the  prob- 
lem. 

"I've  been  thinking  about  that  sort  of  thing  for  years," 
he  remarked,  strolling  towards  them. 

"Well,  sir,  aren't  you  with  me?"  asked  Troop. 

"No.     I'm  for  Joan — and  Peter." 
'But  that  sort  of  trick  play— 

"No.  The  way  to  play  a  game  is  to  get  all  over  the  game 
and  to  be  equal  to  anything  in  it.  If  there  is  a  stroke  or 
anything  that  spoils  the  game  it  ought  to  be  barred  by  the 
rules.  Apart  from  that,  a  game  ought  to  be  worked  out  to  its 
last  possibility.  Things  oughtn't  to  be  barred  in  the  in- 
terests of  a  few  conventional  swipes.  This  cutting  down  of 
a  game  to  just  a  few  types  of  stroke " 

Peter  looked  apprehensive. 

"It's  laziness,"  said  Oswald. 

Troop  was  too  puzzled  to  be  offended.  "But  you  have  to 
work  tremendously  hard,  sir,  at  the  proper  game." 

"Not  mentally,"  said  Oswald.     "There's  too  much  good 


ADOLESCENCE  319 

form  in  all  our  games.  It's  just  a  way  of  cutting  down  a 
game  to  a  formality. ' ' 

"But,  for  instance,  sir,  would  you  bowl  grounders  at 
cricket  ? ' ' 

"If  I  thought  the  batsman  had  been  too  lazy  to  learn  what 
to  do  with  them.  Why  not?" 

"If  you  look  at  it  like  that,  sir!"  said  Troop  and  had  no 
more  to  say.  But  he  went  away  marvelling.  Oswald  was  a 
V.C.  Yet  he  looked  at  games  like — like  an  American,  he 
played  to  win ;  it  was  enough  to  perplex  any  one.  .  .  . 

"Must  confess  I  don't  see  it,"  said  Troop  when  Oswald 
had  gone.  .  .  . 

When  at  last  Troop  and  Wilmington  departed  Oswald  went 
with  them  to  the  station — the  luggage  was  sent  on  in  the 
cart — and  walked  back  over  the  ploughed  ridge  and  up  the 
lane  with  Peter.  For  a  time  they  kept  silence,  but  Troop 
was  in  both  their  minds. 

"He's  a  good  sort,"  said   Peter. 

"Admirable — in  some  ways." 

"I  thought,"  said  Peter,  "you  didn't  like  him.  You  kept 
on  pulling  his  leg." 

So  Peter  had  seen. 

"Well,  he  doesn't  exercise  his  brain  very  much,"  said 
Oswald. 

"Stops  short  at  his  neck,"  said  Peter.  "Exercise,  I 
mean." 

"You  and  Troop  are  singularly  unlike  each  other,"  said 
Oswald. 

"Oh,  that's  exactly  it.  I  can't  make  out  why  I  like  him. 
If  nothing  else  attracted  me,  that  would. ' ' 

"Does  he  know  why  he  likes  you?" 

"Hasn't  the  ghost  of  an  idea.  It  worries  him  at  times. 
Makes  him  want  to  try  and  get  all  over  me. ' ' 

"Does  he— at  all?" 

"Lots,"  said  Peter.  "I  fag  at  the  blessed  Cadet  Corps 
simply  because  I  like  him.  At  rugger  he 's  rather  a  god,  you 
know.  And  he's  a  clean  chap." 

"He's  clean." 

"Oh,  he's  clean.  It's  catching,"  said  Peter,  and  seemed 
to  reflect.  "And  in  a  sort  of  way  lately  old  Troop's  taken 


320  JOAN  AND  PETER 

to  swatting.  It's  pathetic."  Then  with  a  shade  of  anxiety, 
"I  don't  think  for  a  moment  he  twigged  you  were  pulling 
his  leg." 

Oswald  came  to  the  thing  that  was  really  troubling  hi>n. 
"Allowing  for  his  class,"  said  Oswald,  "that  young  man  is 
growing  up  to  an  outlook  upon  the  world  about  as  broad  and 
high  as  the  outlook  of  a  bricklayer's  labourer." 

Peter  reflected  impartially,  and  Oswald  noted  incidentally 
what  a  good  profile  the  boy  was  developing. 

"A  Clean,  Serious  bricklayer's  labourer,"  said  Peter, 
weighing  his  adjectives  carefully. 

"But  he  may  go  into  Parliament,  or  have  to  handle  a  big 
business,"  said  Oswald. 

"Army  for  Troop,"  said  Peter,  "via  a  university  com- 
mission." 

' '  Even  armies  have  to  be  handled  intelligently  nowadays, ' ' 
said  Oswald. 

"He'll  go  into  the  cavalry,"  said  Peter,  making  one  of 
those  tremendous  jumps  in  thought  that  were  characteristic 
of  himself  and  Joan. 

§  12 

A  day  or  so  after  Troop's  departure  Peter  waylaid  Oswald 
in  the  garden.  Peter,  now  that  Troop  had  gone,  was  amus- 
ing himself  with  dissection  again — an  interest  that  Troop 
had  disposed  of  as  a  "bit  morbid."  Oswald  thought  the 
work  Peter  did  neat  and  good;  he  had  to  brush  up  his  own 
rather  faded  memories  of  Huxley's  laboratory  in  order  to 
keep  pace  with  the  boy. 

"I  wish  you'd  come  to  the  Glory  Hole  and  look  at  an  old 
rat  I  dissected  yesterday.  I  want  to  get  its  solar  plexus 
and  I'm  not  sure  about  it.  I've  been  using  acetic  acid  to 
bring  out  the  nerves,  but  there's  such  a  lot  of  white  stuff 
about.  ..." 

The  dissection  was  a  good  piece  of  work,  the  stomach 
cleaned  out  and  the  viscera  neatly  displayed.  Very  much 
in  evidence  were  eight  small  embryo  rats  which  the  specimen 
under  examination,  had  not  science  overtaken  her,  would 
presently  have  added  to  the  rat  population  of  the  world. 


ADOLESCENCE  321 

"The  old  girl's  been  going  it,"  said  Peter  in  a  casual 
tone,  and  turned  these  things  over  with  the  handle  of  his 
scalpel.  "Now  is  all  this  stuff  solar  plexus,  Nobby?"  .  .  . 

The  next  morning  Oswald  stopped  short  in  the  middle  of 
his  shaving,  which  in  his  case  involved  the  most  tortuous 
deflections  and  grimacings.  "It's  all  right  with  the  boy," 
he  said  to  himself. 

"I  think  it's  all  right. 

"No  nonsense  about  it  anyhow. 

"But  what  a  tortuous,  untraceable  business  the  coming  of 
knowledge  is!  Curiosity.  A  fad  for  dissecting.  An  in- 
stinct for  cleanliness.  Pride.  A  bigger  boy  like  Troop.  .  .  . 
Suppose  Troop  had  been  a  different  sort  of  boy  ?  .  .  . 

"But  then  I  suppose  Peter  and  he  wouldn't  have  hit  it 
off  together." 

Oswald  scraped,  and  presently  his  mind  tried  over  a 
phrase. 

"Inherent  powers  of  selection,"  said  Oswald.  "Inherent. 
...  I  suppose  I  picked  my  way  through  a  pretty  queer  lot 
of  stuff. 

Pie  stood  wiping  his  safety-razor  blade. 

"There  was  more  mystery  in  my  time  and  more  emotion. 
This  is  better.  .  .  . 

"Facts  are  clean,"  said  Oswald,  uttering  the  essential 
faith  with  which  science  has  faced  vice  and  priestcraft,  magic 
and  muddle  and  fear  and  mystery,  the  whole  world  over. 

"Facts  are  clean." 

§  13 

Joan  followed  a  year  after  Peter  to  Cambridge.  She  en- 
tered at  Newton  Hall.  Both  Oswald  and  Aunt  Phyllis  pre- 
ferred Newnham  to  Girton  because  of  the  greater  freedom 
of  the  former  college.  They  agreed  that,  as  Oswald  put  it, 
if  women  were  to  be  let  out  of  purdah  they  might  as  well  be 
let  right  out. 

Coming  from  Highmorton  to  Newnham  was  like  emerging 
from  some  narrow,  draughty  passage  in  which  one  marches 
muddily  with  a  whispering,  giggling  hockey  team  all  very 
much  of  a  sort,  into  a  busy  and  confused  market-place,  a 


322  JOAN  AND  PETER 

rather  squabbling  and  very  exciting  market-place,  in  which 
there  is  the  greatest  variety  of  sorts.  And  Joan's  mind,  too, 
was  opening  out  in  an  even  greater  measure.  A  year  or  so 
ago  she  was  a  spirited,  intelligent  animal,  a  being  of  dreams 
and  unaccountable  impulses;  in  a  year  or  so's  time  she  was 
to  become  a  shaped  and  ordered  mind,  making  plans,  con- 
trolling every  urgency,  holding  herself  in  relation  to  a 
definite  conception  of  herself  and  the  world.  We  have  still 
to  gauge  the  almost  immeasurable  receptivity  of  those  three 
or  four  crucial  years.  We  have  still  to  grasp  what  the  due 
use  of  those  years  may  mean  for  mankind. 

Oswald  had  been  at  great  pains  to  find  out  what  was 
the  best  education  the  Empire  provided  for  these  two  wards 
of  his.  But  his  researches  had  brought  him  to  realize  chiefly 
how  poor  and  spiritless  a  thing  was  the  very  best  formal 
education  that  the  Empire  could  offer.  It  seemed  to  him,  in 
the  bitter  urgency  of  his  imperial  passion,  perhaps  even 
poorer  than  it  was.  There  was  a  smattering  of  Latin,  a 
thinner  smattering  of  Greek,  a  little  patch  of  Mediterranean 
history  and  literature  detached  from  past  and  future — all 
university  history  seemed  to  Oswald  to  be  in  disconnected 
fragments — but  then  he  would  have  considered  any  history 
fragmentary  that  did  not  begin  with  the  geological  record 
and  end  with  a  clear  tracing  of  every  traceable  consequence 
of  the  "period"  in  current  affairs;  there  were  mathematical 
specializations  that  did  not  so  much  broaden  the  mind  as 
take  it  into  a  gully,  modern  and  mediaeval  language  speciali- 
zations, philosophical  studies  that  were  really  not  philosophi- 
cal studies  at  all  but  partial  examinations  of  remote  and 
irrelevant  systems,  the  study  of  a  scrap  of  Plato  or  Aristotle 
here,  or  an  excursion  (by  means  of  translations)  into  the 
Hegelian  phraseology  there.  This  sort  of  thing  given  out  to 
a  few  thousand  young  men,  for  the  most  part  greatly  pre- 
occupied with  games,  and  to  a  few  hundred  young  women, 
was  all  that  Oswald  could  discover  by  way  of  mental  binding 
for  the  entire  empire.  It  seemed  to  him  like  innervating  a 
body  as  big  as  the  world  with  a  brain  as  big  as  a  pin 's  head. 
As  Joan  and  Peter  grew  out  of  school  and  went  up  to  Cam- 
bridge they  became  more  and  more  aware  of  a  note  of 
lamentation  and  woe  in  the  voice  of  their  guardian.  He 


ADOLESCENCE  323 

talked  at  them,  over  their  heads  at  lunch  and  dinner,  to  this 
or  that  visitor.  He  also  talked  to  them.  But  he  had  a  great 
dread  of  preachments.  They  were  aware  of  his  general  dis- 
content with  the  education  he  was  giving  them,  but  as  yet 
they  had  no  standards  by  which  to  judge  his  charges.  Over 
their  heads  his  voice  argued  that  the  universities  would  give 
them  no  access  worth  considering  to  the  thoughts  and  facts 
of  India,  Russia,  or  China,  that  they  were  ignoring  some- 
thing stupendous  called  America,  that  their  political  and 
economic  science  still  neglected  the  fact  that  every  problem 
in  politics,  every  problem  in  the  organization  of  production 
and  social  co-operation  is  a  psychological  problem ;  and  that 
all  these  interests  were  supremely  urgent  interests,  and  how 
the  devil  was  one  going  to  get  these  things  in?  But  one 
thing  Joan  and  Peter  did  grasp  from  these  spluttering  disser- 
tations that  flew  round  and  about  them.  They  had  to  find 
out  all  the  most  important  things  in  life  for  themselves. 

Perhaps  the  problem  of  making  the  teacher  of  youth  an 
inspiring  figure  is  an  insoluble  one.  At  any  rate,  there  was 
no  great  stir  evoked  in  Joan  and  Peter  by  the  personalities 
of  any  of  their  university  tutors,  lecturers,  and  professors. 
These  seemed  to  be  for  the  most  part  little-spirited,  gossiping 
men.  They  had  also  an  effect  of  being  underpaid ;  they  had 
been  caught  early  by  the  machinery  of  prize  and  scholarship, 
bred,  "in  the  menagerie";  they  were  men  who  knew  nothing 
of  the  world  outside,  nothing  of  effort  and  adventure,  noth- 
ing of  sin  and  repentance.  Not  that  there  were  not  whispers 
and  scandals  about,  but  such  sins  as  the  dons  knew  of  were 
rather  in  the  nature  of  dirty  affectations,  got  out  of  Petro- 
nius  and  Suetonius  and  practised  with  a  tremendous  sense 
of  devilment  behind  locked  doors,  than  those  graver  and 
larger  sins  that  really  distress  and  mar  mankind.  As  Joan 
and  Peter  encountered  these  master  minds,  they  appeared 
as  gowned  and  capped  individuals,  hurrying  to  lecture- 
rooms,  delivering  lectures  that  were  often  hasty  and  indis- 
tinct, making  obscure  but  caustic  allusions  to  rival  teachers, 
parrying  the  troublesome  inquiring  student  with  an  accus- 
tomed and  often  quite  pretty  wit.  With  a  lesser  subtlety 
and  a  greater  earnestness  the  women  dons  had  fallen  in  with 
this  tradition.  There  were  occasional  shy  personal  contacts. 


324  JOAN  AND  PETER 

But  at  his  tea  or  breakfast  the  don  was  usually  too  anxious 
to  impress  Peter  with  the  idea  that  he  himself  was  really 
only  a  sort  of  overgrown  undergraduate,  to  produce  any 
other  effect  at  all. 

Into  the  Cambridge  lecture  rooms  and  laboratories  went 
Joan  and  Peter,  notebook  in  hand,  and  back  to  digestion  in 
their  studies,  and  presently  they  went  into  examination 
rooms  where  they  vindicated  their  claim  to  have  attended 
to  textbook  and  lecture.  In  addition  Peter  did  some  re- 
markably good  sketches  of  tutors  and  professors  and  fellow 
students.  This  was  their  " grind,"  Joan  and  Peter  con- 
sidered, a  drill  they  had  to  go  through ;  it  became  them  to 
pass  these  tests  creditably — if  only  to  play  the  game  towards 
old  Nobby.  Only  with  Peter's  specialization  in  biology  did 
he  begin  to  find  any  actuality  in  these  processes.  He  found 
a  charm  in  phylogenetic  speculations ;  and  above  the  narrow 
canons  of  formal  "research"  there  were  fascinating  uplands 
of  wisdom.  Upon  those  uplands  there  lay  a  light  in  which 
even  political  and  moral  riddles  took  on  a  less  insoluble 
aspect.  But  going  out  upon  those  uplands  was  straying  from 
the  proper  work.  .  .  .  Joan  got  even  less  from  her  moral 
philosophy.  Her  principal  teacher  was  a  man  shaped  like 
a  bubble,  whose  life  and  thought  was  all  the  blowing  of  a 
bubble.  He  claimed  to  have  proved  human  immortality. 
It  was,  he  said,  a  very  long  and  severe  logical  process. 
About  desire,  about  art,  about  social  association,  about  love, 
about  God — for  he  knew  also  that  there  was  no  God — it  mat- 
tered not  what  deep  question  assailed  him,  this  gifted  being 
would  dip  into  his  Hegelian  suds  and  blow  without  apparent 
effort,  and  there  you  were — as  wise  as  when  you  started ! 
And  off  the  good  man  would  float,  infinitely  self-satisfied  and 
manifestly  absurd. 

But  even  Peter's  biology  was  only  incidentally  helpful 
in  answering  the  fierce  questions  that  life  was  now  thrusting 
upon  him  and  Joan.  Nor  had  this  education  linked  them 
up  to  any  great  human  solidarity.  It  was  like  being  guided 
into  a  forest — and  lost  there — by  queer,  absent-minded  men. 
They  had  no  sense  of  others  being  there  too,  upon  a  common 
adventure.  .  . 


ADOLESCENCE  325 

"And  it  is  all  that  I  can  get  for  them!"  said  Oswald. 
"Bad  as  it  is,  it  is  the  best  thing  there  is." 

He  tried  to  tind  comfort  in  comparisons. 

"Has  any  country  in  the  world  got  anything  much 
better?" 

§  14 

One  day  Oswald  found  himself  outside  Cambridge  on  the 
Huntingdon  road.  It  was  when  he  had  settled  that  Peter 
was  to  enter  Trinity,  and  while  he  was  hesitating  between 
Newnham  and  Girtou  as  Joan's  destiny.  There  was  a  little 
difficulty  in  discovering  Girton.  Unlike  Newnham,  which 
sits  down  brazenly  in  Cambridge,  Girton  is  but  half-heart- 
edly at  Cambridge,  coyly  a  good  mile  from  the  fountains  of 
knowledge,  hiding  its  blushes  between  tall  trees.  He  was 
reminded  absurdly  of  a  shy,  nice  girl  sitting  afar  off  until 
father  should  come  out  of  the  public-house.  .  .  . 

He  fell  thinking  about  the  education  of  women  in  Great 
Britain. 

At  first  he  had  been  disposed  to  think  chiefly  of  Peter's 
education  and  to  treat  Joan's  as  a  secondary  matter;  but 
little  by  little,  as  he  watched  British  affairs  close  at  hand, 
he  had  come  to  measure  the  mischief  feminine  illiteracy  can 
do  in  the  world.  In  no  country  do  the  lunch  and  dinner- 
party, the  country  house  and  personal  acquaintance,  play  so 
large  a  part  in  politics  as  they  do  in  Great  Britain.  And  the 
atmosphere  of  all  that  inner  world  of  influence  is  a  woman- 
made  atmosphere,  and  an  atmosphere  made  by  women  who 
are  for  the  most  part  untrained  and  unread.  Here  at  Girton 
and  Newnham,  and  at  Oxford  at  Somerville,  he  perceived 
there  could  not  be  room  for  a  tithe  of  the  girls  of  the  influ- 
ential and  governing  classes.  Where  were  the  rest?  Eng- 
lish womanhood  was  as  yet  only  nibbling  at  university  life. 
Where  were  the  girls  of  the  peerage,  the  county-family  girls 
and  the  like?  Their  brothers  came  up,  but  they  stayed  at 
home  and  were  still  educated  scarcely  better  than  his  Aunt 
Charlotte  had  been  educated  forty  years  ago — by  a  genteel 
person,  by  a  sort  of  mental  maid  who  did  their  minds  as 
their  maids  did  their  hair  for  the  dinner-table. 


326  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"No  wonder,"  he  said,  "they  poison  politics  and  turn  it 
all  into  personal  intrigues.  No  wonder  they  want  religion 
to  be  just  a  business  of  personal  consolations.  No  wonder 
every  sort  of  charlatan  and  spook  dealer,  fortune-teller  and 
magic  healer  flourishes  in  London.  Well,  Joan  anyhow  shall 
have  whatever  they  can  give  her  here.  .  .  . 

"It's  better  than  nothing.    And  she'll  talk  and  read.  ..." 

§  15 

But  school  and  university  are  only  the  formal  part  of  edu- 
cation. The  larger  part  of  the  education  of  every  human 
being  is  and  always  has  been  and  must  be  provided  by  the 
Thing  that  Is.  Every  adult  transaction  has  as  its  most  im- 
portant and  usually  most  neglected  aspect  its  effect  upon  the 
minds  of  the  young.  Behind  school  and  university  the  Em- 
pire itself  was  undesignedly  addressing  Joan  and  Peter.  It 
was,  so  to  speak,  gesticulating  at  them  over  their  teachers' 
heads  and  under  their  teachers'  arms.  It  was  performing 
ceremonies  and  exhibiting  spectacles  of  a  highly  suggestive 
nature. 

In  a  large  and  imposing  form  certain  ideas  were  stead- 
fastly thrust  at  Joan  and  Peter.  More  particularly  was  the 
idolization  of  the  monarchy  thrust  upon  them.  In  terms 
of  zeal  and  reverence  the  press,  the  pulpit,  and  the  world 
at  large  directed  the  innocent  minds  of  Joan  and  Peter  to 
the  monarch  as  if  that  individual  were  the  Reason,  the 
Highest  Good  and  Crown  of  the  collective  life.  Nothing 
else  in  the  world  of  Joan  and  Peter  got  anything  like  the 
same  tremendous  show.  Their  early  years  were  coloured 
by  the  reflected  glories  of  the  Diamond  Jubilee ;  followed  the 
funeral  pomps  of  Queen  Victoria,  with  much  mobbing  of 
negligent  or  impecunious  people  not  in  black  by  the  loyal 
London  crowd;  then  came  the  postponed  and  then  the  ac- 
tual coronation  of  King  Edward,  public  prayings  for  his 
health,  his  stupendous  funeral  glories;  succeeded  by  the 
coronation  of  King  George,  and  finally,  about  the  time  that 
Joan  followed  Peter  up  to  Cambridge,  the  Coronation  Dur- 
bar. The  multitude  which  could  not  go  to  India  went  at 
least  to  the  Scala  cinema,  and  saw  the  adoration  in  all  its 


ADOLESCENCE  327 

natural  colours.  Reverent  crowds  choked  that  narrow  by- 
street. Across  all  the  life  and  activities  of  England,  across 
all  her  intellectual  and  moral  effort,  holding  up  legislation, 
interfering  with  industry,  stopping  the  traffic,  masking  every 
reality  of  the  collective  life,  these  vast  formalities  trailed 
with  a  magnificent  priority.  Nothing  was  respected  as  they 
were  respected!  Sober  statesmen  were  seen  invested  in 
strange  garments  that  no  sensible  person  would  surely  wear 
except  for  the  gravest  reasons;  the  archbishops  and  bishops 
were  discovered  bent  with  reverence,  invoking  the  name  of 
God  freely,  blessing  the  Crown  with  the  utmost  gravity,  in- 
vesting the  Sovereign  with  Robe  and  Orb,  Ring  and  Sceptre, 
anointing  him  with  the  Golden  Coronation  Spoon.  Either 
the  Crown  was  itself  a  matter  of  altogether  supreme  im- 
portance to  the  land  or  else  it  was  the  most  stupendous  fool- 
ery that  ever  mocked  and  confused  the  grave  realities  of  a 
great  people 's  affairs. 

The  effect  of  it  upon  the  minds  of  our  two  young  people 
was — complicating.  How  complicating  it  is  few  people  re- 
alize who  have  not  closely  studied  the  educational  process 
of  the  British  mind  as  a  whole.  Then  it  becomes  manifest 
that  the  monarch,  the  state  church,  and  the  system  of  titles 
and  social  precedence  centering  upon  the  throne,  constitute 
a  system  of  mental  entanglements  against  which  British  edu- 
cation struggles  at  an  enormous  disadvantage.  The  mon- 
archy in  Great  Britain  is  a  compromise  that  was  accepted 
by  a  generation  regardless  of  education  and  devoid  of  any 
sense  of  the  future.  It  is  now  a  mask  upon  the  British 
face;  it  is  a  gaudy  and  antiquated  and  embarrassing  wrap- 
ping about  the  energies  of  the  nation.  Because  of  it  Britain 
speaks  to  her  youth,  as  to  the  world,  with  two  voices.  She 
speaks  as  a  democratic  republic,  just  ever  so  little  crowned, 
and  also  she  speaks  as  a  succulently  loyal  Teutonic  monarchy. 
Either  she  is  an  adolescent  democracy  whose  voice  is  break- 
ing or  an  old  monarchy  at  the  squeaking  stage.  Now  her 
voice  is  the  full  strong  voice  of  a  great  people,  now  it  pipes 
ridiculously.  She  perplexes  the  world  and  stultifies  herself. 

That  was  why  her  education  led  up  to  no  such  magnificent 
exposition  and  consolidation  of  purpose  as  Oswald  dreamt 
of  for  his  wards.  Instead,  the  track  presently  lost  itself  in 


328  JOAN  AND  PETER 

a  maze  of  prevarications  and  evasions.  The  country  was 
double-minded,  double-mindedness  had  become  its  habit,  and 
it  had  lost  the  power  of  decision.  Every  effort  to  broaden 
and  modernize  university  education  in  Britain  encountered 
insurmountable  difficulties  because  of  this  fundamental  dis- 
persal of  aim.  The  court  got  in  the  way,  the  country  clergy 
got  in  the  way,  the  ruling-class  families  got  in  the  way.  It 
is  impossible  to  turn  a  wandering,  chance-made  track  into  a 
good  road  until  you  know  where  it  is  to  go.  And  that  ques- 
tion of  destination  was  one  that  no  Englishman  before  the 
war  could  be  induced  to  put  into  plain  language.  Double- 
mindedness  had  become  his  second  nature.  From  the  verjr 
outset  it  had  taken  possession  of  him.  When  a  young  Ameri- 
can goes  to  his  teacher  to  ask  why  he  should  serve  his  state, 
he  is  shown  a  flag  of  thirteen  stripes  and  eight  and  forty 
stars  and  told  a  very  plain  and  inspiring  history.  His  re- 
lations to  his  country  are  thenceforward  as  simple  and  un- 
questionable as  a  child 's  to  its  mother.  He  may  be  patriotic 
or  unpatriotic  as  a  son  may  be  dutiful  or  undutiful,  but  he 
will  not  be  muddle-headed.  But  when  Joan  and  Peter  first 
began  to  realize  that  they  belonged  to  the  British  Empire 
they  were  shown  a  little  old  German  woman  and  told  that 
reverence  for  her  linked  us  in  a  common  abjection  with  the 
millions  of  India.  They  were  told  also  that  really  this  little 
old  lady  did  nothing  of  the  slightest  importance  and  that 
the  country  was  the  freest  democracy  on  earth,  ruled  by  its 
elected  representatives.  And  each  of  these  preposterously 
contradictory  stories  pursued  them  in  an  endless  series  of 
variations  up  to  adolescence.  .  .  . 

To  two  naturally  clear-headed  young  people  it  became 
presently  as  palpably  absurd  to  have  a  great  union  of  civil- 
ized states  thus  impersonated  as  it  is  to  have  Wall  imper- 
sonated by  Snout  the  Tinker  in  A  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream,  They  were  already  jeering  at  royalty  and  the 
church  with  Aunt  Phyllis  long  before  they  went  up  to  Cam- 
bridge. There  they  found  plenty  of  associates  to  jeer  with 
them.  And  there  too  they  found  a  quite  congenial  parallel 
stream  of  jeering  against  Parliament,  which  pretended  to 
represent  the  national  mind  and  quality,  but  which  was 
elected  by  a  method  that  manifestly  gave  no  chance  to  any 


ADOLESCENCE 

candidate  who  was  not  nominated  by  a  party  organization. 
In  times  of  long  established  peace,  when  the  tradition  of 
generations  has  established  the  illusion  of  the  profoundest 
human  security,  men's  minds  are  not  greatly  distressed  by 
grotesqueness  and  absurdity  in  their  political  forms.  It  is 
all  part  of  the  humour  and  the  good-humour  of  life.  When 
one  believes  that  all  the  tigers  in  the  jungle  are  dead,  it  is 
quite  amusing  to  walk  along  the  jungle  paths  in  a  dressing- 
gown  with  a  fan  instead  of  a  gun.  Joan  and  Peter  grew  up 
to  the  persuasion  that  the  crown  above  them  was  rather  a 
good  joke,  and  that  Parliament  and  its  jobs  and  party  flum- 
mery were  also  a  joke,  and  that  the  large,  deep  rottenness 
in  this  British  world  about  them  was  perhaps  in  the  nature 
of  things  and  anyhow  beyond  their  altering.  They  too  were 
becoming  double-minded  according  to  the  tradition  of  the 
land. 

Yet  beneath  this  acquiescence  in  the  deep-rooted  political 
paradox  of  Britain  they  were  capable  of  the  keenest  interest 
in  a  number  of  questions  that  they  really  believed  were  alive. 
It  became  manifest  to  them  that  this  great  golden  prepos- 
terous world  was  marred  by  certain  injustices  and  unkind- 
nesses.  Something  called  Labour  they  heard  was  unhappy 
and  complained  of  unfair  treatment,  certain  grumblings 
came  from  India  and  Ireland,  and  there  was  a  curiously  ex- 
citing subject  which  demanded  investigation  and  reforming- 
activities  called  the  sex  question.  And  generally  there 
seemed  to  be,  for  no  particular  reason,  a  lot  of  restrictions 
upon  people's  conduct. 

In  addition  Peter  had  acquired  from  Oswald,  rather  by 
way  of  example  than  precept,  a  very  definite  persuasion, 
and  Joan  had  acquired  a  persuasion  that  was  perhaps  not 
quite  so  clearly  and  deeply  cut,  that  to  make  it  respectable 
there  ought  to  be  something  in  one's  life  in  the  nature  of 
special  work.  In  Oswald's  case  it  was  his  African  interest. 
Peter  thought  that  his  own  work  might  perhaps  be  biological. 
But  that  one's  work  ought  to  join  on  to  the  work  of  the  peo- 
ple or  that  all  the  good  work  in  the  world  should  make  one 
whole  was  a  notion  that  had  not  apparently  entered  Peter's 
mind.  Oswald  with  his  dread  of  preachments  was  doubtful 
about  any  deliberate  dissertations  in  the  matter.  He  got 


330  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter  to  begin  the  Martyrdom  of  Man,  which  had  so  pro- 
foundly affected  his  own  life,  but  Peter  expressed  doubts 
about  the  correctness  of  Reade's  Egyptian  history,  and  put 
the  book  aside  and  did  not  go  on  reading  it. 

At  times  Oswald  tried  to  say  something  to  Joan  and  Peter 
of  his  conception  of  the  Empire  as  a  great  human  enterprise, 
playing  a  dominating  part  in  the  establishment  of  a  world 
peace  and  a  world  civilization,  and  giving  a  form  and  direc- 
tion and  pride  to  every  life  within  it.  But  these  perpetual 
noises  of  royalty  in  its  vulgarest,  most  personal  form,  the 
loyalist  chatter  of  illiterate  women  and  the  clamour  of  the 
New  Imperialism  to  "tax  the  foreigner"  and  exploit  the 
empire  for  gain,  drowned  his  intention  while  it  was  still 
unspoken  in  his  mind.  There  were  moments  when  he  could 
already  ask  himself  whether  this  empire  he  had  shaped  his 
life  to  serve,  this  knightly  empire  of  his,  enlightened,  right- 
eous, and  predominant,  was  anything  better  than  a  dream — 
or  a  lie. 

§  16 

When  Joan  left  Highmorton  she  came  into  the  market- 
place of  ideas.  She  began  to  read  the  newspaper.  She 
ceased  to  be  a  leggy  person  with  a  skirt  like  a  kilt  and  a 
dark  shock  of  hair  not  under  proper  control;  instead,  she 
became  visibly  a  young  lady,  albeit  a  very  young  young  lady, 
and  suddenly  all  adult  conversation  was  open  to  her. 

Under  the  brotherly  auspices  of  Peter  she  joined  the  Cam- 
bridge University  Fabian  Society.  Peter  belonged  to  it, 
but  he  explained  that  he  didn't  approve  of  it.  He  was  in  it 
for  its  own  good.  She  also  took  a  place  in  two  suffrage  or- 
ganizations, and  subscribed  to  three  suffrage  papers.  Tel 
Wymark,  who  was  also  in  Newton  Hall,  introduced  her  to  the 
Club  of  Strange  Faiths,  devoted  to  "the  impartial  exam- 
ination of  all  religious  systems."  And  she  went  under 
proper  escort  to  the  First  Wednesday  in  Every  Month  Teas 
in  Bunny  Cuspard's  rooms.  Bunny  was  an  ex-collegiate 
student,  he  had  big,  comfortable  rooms  in  Siddermorton 
Street,  and  these  gatherings  of  his  were  designed  to  be  dis- 
cussions, very  memorable  discussions  of  the  most  advanced 


ADOLESCENCE  331 

type,  about  this  and  that.  As  a  matter  of  fact  they  consisted 
in  about  equal  proportions  of  awkward  silences,  scornful 
treatment  of  current  reputations,  and  Bunny,  in  a  loose,  in- 
accurate way,  spilling  your  tea  or  handing  you  edibles. 
Bunny 's  cakes  and  sandwiches  were  wonderful ;  in  that  re- 
spect he  was  a  born  hostess.  Junior  dons  and  chance  visitors 
to  Cambridge  would  sometimes  drift  in  to  Bunny's  intellec- 
tual feasts,  and  here  it  was  that  Joan  met  young  Winterbaum 
again. 

Young  Winterbaum  was  rather  a  surprise.  He  had  got 
his  features  together  astonishingly  since  the  days  of  Miss 
Murgatroyd  's  school ;  he  had  grown  a  moustache,  much  more 
of  a  moustache  than  Peter  was  to  have  for  years  yet,  and 
was  altogether  remarkably  grown  up  and  a  man  of  the 
world.  "Funny  lot,"  he  remarked  to  Joan  when  he  had 
sat  down  beside  her.  "Why  do  you  come  to  Cambridge?" 

"My  people  make  me  come  up  here,"  he  explained;  "fam- 
ily considerations,  duty  to  the  old  country,  loyalty  to  the  old 
college,  and  all  that.  But  I'd  rather  be  painting.  It's  the 
only  live  thing  just  now.  You  up  to  anything?" 

"Ears  and  eyes  and  mouth  wide  open,"  said  Joan. 

"This  show  isn't  worth  it.  Do  you  ever  drift  towards 
Chelsea?" 

Joan  said  she  went  to  Hampstead  now  and  then ;  she  stayed 
sometimes  with  the  Sheldricks,  who  were  in  a  congested  house 
on  Downshire  Hill  now,  and  sometimes  with  Miss  Jepson. 
Henceforth,  now  that  she  was  no  longer  under  the  Highmor- 
ton  yoke,  she  hoped  to  be  in  London  oftener. 

"Did  you  see  the  Picasso  show?"  asked  Winterbaum. 

She  had  not. 

"You  missed  something,"  said  young  Winterbaum,  just 
like  old  times.  "Picasso,  Mancini;  these  are  the  gods  of  my 
idolatry.  ..." 

Bunny  Cuspard  interrupted  clumsily  with  some  specially 
iced  cakes.  Joan,  accepting  a  cake,  discovered  Wilmington 
talking  absentmindedly  to  her  chaperon  and  looking  Pogroms 
at  Winterbaum.  So  Joan,  pleased  rather  than  excited  by 
this  chance  evidence  of  a  continuing  interest,  lifted  up  a  face 
of  bright  recognition  and  smiled  and  nodded  to  Wilming- 
ton. 


332  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  17 

It  was  the  ambition  of  Mrs.  Sheldrick  and  her  remaining 
daughters — some  of  them  had  married — to  make  their  home 
on  Downshire  Hill  "a  little  bit  of  the  London  Quartier 
Latin." 

Mr.  Sheldrick  had  worn  out  the  large,  loose,  tweed  suit 
that  had  held  him  together  for  so  long,  he  had  gone  to  pieces 
altogether  and  was  dead  arid  buried,  and  the  Sheldricks  were 
keeping  a  home  together  by  the  practice  of  decorative  arts 
and  promiscuous  hospitalities.  Mrs.  Sheldrick  was  writing 
a  little  in  the  papers  of  the  weaker  among  the  various  editors 
who  lived  within  her  social  range;  little  vague  reviews  and 
poems  she  wrote,  with  a  quiet  smile,  that  were  not  so  much 
allusive  as  with  an  air  of  having  recently  had  a  flying  visit 
from  an  allusion  that  was  unable  to  stay.  Sydney  Sheldrick 
was  practising  sculpture,  and  Babs  was  attending  the  Lon- 
don School  of  Dramatic  Art,  to  which  Adela  March ison  had 
also  found  her  way.  Aritonia,  the  eldest,  was  in  business, 
making  djibbah-like  robes. 

There  was  downstairs  and  the  passage  and  staircase  and 
upstairs,  a  sitting-room  in  front,  and  a  sort  of  oriental 
lounge  (that  later  in  the  evening  became  the  bedroom  of 
Antonia  and  Babs)  behind.  It  had  all  been  decorated  in 
the  most  modern  style  by  Antonia  in  a  very  blue  blue  that 
seemed  a  little  threadbare  in  places  and  very  large,  sug- 
gestive shapes  of  orange,  with  a  sort  of  fringe  of  black  and 
white  chequers  and  a  green  ceiling  with  harsh  pink  stars. 
And  the  chairs,  except  for  the  various  ottomans  and  cosy 
corners  which  were  in  faded  blue  canvas,  had  been  painted 
bright  pink  or  grey. 

Into  this  house  they  gathered,  after  nine  and  more  particu- 
larly on  Saturdays,  all  sorts  of  people  who  chanced  to  be  con- 
nected by  birth,  marriage,  misfortune,  or  proclivity  with  jour- 
nalism or  the  arts.  Hither  came  Aunt  Phoebe  Stubland,  and 
read  a  paper  called  insistently:  Watchman,  What  of  the 
Night ?  What  of  it?  arid  quite  up  to  its  title;  and  hither 
too  came  Aunt  Phyllis  Stubland,  quietly  observant.  But 
quite  a  lot  of  writers  came.  And  in  addition  there  were 
endless  conspirators.  There  was  Mrs.  O'Grady,  the  beauti- 


ADOLESCENCE  333 

ful  Irish  patriot,  who  was  always  dressed  like  a  procession 
of  Hibernians  in  New  York,  and  there  was  Patrick  Lynch, 
a  long,  lax  black  object,  ending  below  in  large  dull  boots, 
and  above  in  a  sad  white  face  under  wiry  black  hair,  griev- 
ing for  ever  that  grief  for  Ireland — Cathleen  ni  Houlihan 
and  all  the  rest  of  it — that  only  these  long,  black,  pale  Irish- 
men can  understand.  And  there  was  Eric  Schmidt,  who 
was  rare  among  Irish  patriots  because  of  his  genuine  knowl- 
edge of  Erse.  All  these  were  great  conspirators.  Then 
there  was  Mrs.  Punk,  who  had  hunger-struck  three  times, 
and  Miss  Corcorau-Deeping  the  incendiary.  And  American 
socialists.  And  young  Indians.  And  one  saw  the  venerable 
figure  of  Mr.  Woodjer,  very  old  now  and  white  and  deaf 
and  nervous  and  indistinct,  who  had  advocated  in  several 
beautiful  and  poetical  little  volumes  a  new  morality  that 
would  have  put  the  wind  up  of  the  Cities  of  the  Plain. 
And  Winterbaum  drifted  in,  but  cautiously,  as  doubting 
whether  it  wasn't  just  "a  bit  too  marginal,"  to  bring  away 
his  two  frizzy-haired  sisters,  very  bright-eyed  and  eager, 
rapid-speaking  and  au  fait,  and  wonderfully  bejewelled  for 
creatures  so  young.  They  were  going  in  for  dancing;  they 
did  Spanish  dances,  stupendously  clicking  down  their  red 
heels  with  absolute  precision  together;  they  took  the  Shel- 
dricks  on  the  way  to  the  Contangos  or  the  Mondaines  or  the 
Levisons,  or  even  to  the  Hoggenheimers ;  they  glittered  at 
Downshire  Hill  like  birds  of  Paradise,  and  had  the  loveliest 
necks  and  shoulders  and  arms.  Outside  waited  young  Win- 
terbaum's  coupe — a  very  smart  little  affair  in  black  and 
cream,  with  an  electric  starter  wonderfully  fitted. 

Here  too  came  young  Huntley,  who  had  written  three 
novels  before  he  was  twenty-two,  and  who  was  now  thirty 
and  quite  well  known,  not  only  as  a  novelist  of  reputation, 
but  as  a  critic  eminently  unpopular  with  actor  managers; 
a  blond  young  man  with  a  strong  profile,  a  hungry,  scornful 
expression  and  a  greedy,  large  blue  eye  that  wandered  about 
the  crush  as  if  it  sought  something,  until  it  came  to  rest 
upon  Joan.  Thereafter  Mr.  Huntley 's  other  movements  and 
conversation  were  controlled  by  a  resolution  to  edge  towards 
and  overshadow  and  dominate  Joan  with  the  profile  as  much 
as  possible. 


334  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Joan,  by  various  delicacies  of  perception,  was  quite  aware 
of  these  approaches  without  seeming  at  any  time  to  regard 
Huntley  directly;  and  by  a  subtlety  quite  imperceptible  to 
him  she  drifted  away  from  each  advance.  She  did  not  know 
who  he  was,  and  though  the  profile  interested  her,  his  stead- 
fast advance  towards  her  seemed  to  be  premature.  Until 
suddenly  an  apparently  quite  irrelevant  incident  spun  her 
mind  round  to  the  idea  of  encouraging  him. 

Thp  incident  was  the  arrival  of  Peter. 

Early  in  the  afternoon  he  had  vanished  from  Mrs.  Jep- 
son's,  where  he  and  Joan  were  staying:  he  had  not  come  in 
to  dinner,  and  now  suddenly  he  appeared  conspicuously  in 
this  gathering  of  the  Sheldricks',  conspicuously  in  the  com- 
pany of  Hetty  Beinhart,  who  was  to  Joan,  for  quite  occult 
reasons,  the  most  detestable  of  all  his  large  circle  of  detest- 
able friends.  That  alone  was  enough  to  tax  the  self-re- 
straint of  an  exceedingly  hot-tempered  foster  sister.  (So 
this  was  what  Peter  had  been  doing  with  his  time !  This  had 
been  his  reason  for  neglecting  his  own  household !  At  the 
Petit  Riche,  or  some  such  place — with  her!  A  girl  with  a 
cockney  accent !  A  girl  who  would  stroke  your  arm  as  soon 
as  speak  to  you!  .  .  .)  But  though  the  larger  things  in 
life  strain  us,  it  is  the  smaller  things  that  break  us.  What 
finally  turned  Joan  over  was  a  glance,  a  second's  encounter 
with  Peter's  eye.  Hetty  had  sailed  forward  with  that  ex- 
traordinary effect  of  hers  of  being  a  grown-up,  experienced 
woman,  to  greet  Mrs.  Sheldrick,  and  Peter  stood  behind, 
disregarded.  (His  expression  of  tranquil  self-satisfaction 
was  maddening.)  His  eye  went  round  the  room  looking, 
Joan  knew,  for  two  people.  It  rested  on  Joan. 

The  question  that  Peter  was  asking  Joan  mutely  across 
the  room  was  in  effect  this:  "Are  you  behaving  yourself, 
Joan?" 

Then,  not  quite  reassured  by  an  uncontrollable  scowl, 
Peter  looked  away  to  see  if  some  one  else  was  present.  Some 
one  else  apparently  wasn't  present,  and  Joan  was  unfeign- 
edly  sorry. 

He  was  looking  for  Mir  Jelalludin,  the  interesting  young 
Indian  with  the  beautifully  modelled  face,  whom  Joan  had 
met  and  talked  to  at  the  Club  of  Strange  Faiths.  At  the 


ADOLESCENCE  335 

Club  of  Strange  Faiths  one  day  she  had  been  suddenly 
moved  to  make  a  short  speech  about  the  Buddhist  idea  of 
Nirvana,  which  one  of  the  speakers  had  described  as  extinc- 
tion. Making  a  speech  to  a  little  meeting  was  not  a  very 
difficult  thing  for  Joan ;  she  had  learnt  how  little  terrible  a 
thing  is  to  do  in  the  Highmorton  debating  society,  where 
she  had  been  sustained  by  a  grim  determination  to  score  off 
Miss  Frobisher.  She  said  that  she  thought  the  real  inten- 
tion was  not  extinction  at  all,  but  the  escape  of  the  individual 
consciousness  after  its  living  pilgrimage  from  one  incarnate 
self  to  another  into  the  universal  consciousness.  That  was 
the  very  antithesis  of  extinction ;  one  lost  oneself  indeed, 
but  one  lost  oneself  not  in  darkness  and  non-existence,  but 
in  light  and  the  fullness  of  existence.  There  was  all  the 
difference  between  a  fainting  fit  and  ecstasy  between  these 
two  conceptions.  And  it  was  true  of  experience  that  one 
was  least  oneself,  least  self-conscious  and  egotistical  at  one's 
time  of  greatest  excitement. 

Mir  Jelalludin  received  these  remarks  with  earnest  ap- 
plause. He  made  as  if  to  speak  after  her,  rose  in  his  place, 
and  then  hastily  sat  down.  Afterwards  he  came  and  spoke 
to  her,  quite  modestly  and  simply,  without  the  least  imper- 
tinence. 

He  explained,  with  a  pleasant  staccato  accent  and  little 
slips  in  his  pronunciation  that  suggested  restricted  English 
conversation  and  much  reading  of  books,  how  greatly  he  had 
been  wanting  to  say  just  what  she  had  said,  ''so  bew-ti- 
fully,"  but  he  had  been  restrained  by  "impafction  of  the 
pronunsation.  So  deefi'clt,  you  know."  One  heard  Eng- 
lish people  so  often  not  doing  justice  to  Indian  ideas  so  that 
it  was  very  pleasant  to  hear  them  being  quite  sympathetically 
put. 

There  was  something  very  pleasing  in  the  real  intellectual 
excitement  that  had  made  him  speak  to  her,  and  there  was 
something  very  pleasing  to  the  eye  in  the  neat  precision  with 
which  his  brown  features  were  chiselled  and  the  decisive  ac- 
curacy of  every  single  hair  on  his  brow.  He  was,  he  ex- 
plained, a  Moslem,  but  he  was  interested  in  every  school  of  In- 
dian thought.  He  was  afraid  he  was  not  very  orthodox,  and 
he  showed  a  smile  of  the  most  perfect  teeth.  There  had  always 


336  JOAN  AND  PETER 

been  a  tendency  to  uuiversalism  in  Indian  thought,  that  af- 
fected even  the  Moslem.  Did  she  know  anything  of  the 
Brahmo  Souiaj  ?  Had  she  read  any  novel  of  Chatter ji's 
There  was  at  least  one  great  novel  of  his  the  English  ought 
to  read,  the  Ananda  Math,  No  one  could  understand  In- 
dian thought  properly  who  had  not  read  it.  He  had  a  trans- 
lation of  it  into  English — which  he  would  lend  her. 

Would  she  be  interested  to  read  it? 

Might  he  send  it  to  her? 

Joan's  chaperon  was  a  third  year  girl  who  put  no  bar 
upon  these  amenities.  Joan  accepted  the  book  and  threw 
out  casually  that  she  sometimes  went  to  Bunny  Cuspard's 
teas.  If  Mr.  Jelalludin  sent  her  Chatterji's  book  she  could 
return  it  to  Bunny  Cuspard's  rooms. 

It  was  in  Bunny  Cuspard's  room  that  Peter  had  first 
become  aware  of  this  exotic  friendship.  He  discovered  his 
Joan  snugly  in  a  corner  listening  to  an  explanation  of  the 
attitude  of  Islam  towards  women.  It  had  been  enormously 
misrepresented  in  Christendom.  Mr.  Jelalludin  was  very 
earnest  in  his  exposition,  and  Joan  listened  with  a  pleasant 
smile  and  regarded  him  pleasantly  and  wished  that  she 
could  run  her  fingers  just  once  along  his  e}rebrow  without 
having  her  motives  misunderstood. 

But  at  the  sight  of  his  Joan  engaged  in  this  confabulation 
Peter  suddenly  discovered  all  the  fiercest  traits  of  race  pride. 
He  fretted  about  the  room  and  was  rude  to  other  people  and 
watched  a  book  change  hands,  and  waited  scarcely  twenty 
seconds  after  the  end  of  Joan's  conversation  before  he  came 
up  to  her. 

"I  say,  Joan,"  he  said,  "you  can't  go  chumming  with 
Indians  anyhow." 

"Peter,"  she  said,  "we've  chummed  with  India." 

"Oh,  nonsense!  Not  socially.  Their  standards  are  dif- 
ferent." 

"I  hope  they  are,"  said  Joan.  "The  way  you  make  these 
Indian  boys  here  feel  like  outcasts  is  disgraceful." 

"They're  different.  The  men  aren't  uncivil  to  them. 
But  it  isn't  for  you " 

"It's  for  all  English  people  to  treat  them  well.  H«'g  a 
charming  young  man." 


ADOLESCENCE  337 

'It  isn't  done,  Joan." 
'It's  going  to  be,  Petah." 
'You're  meeting  him  again?" 
'If  I  think  proper." 

'Oh!"   said   Peter,    baffled   for   the   time.    "All    right, 
Joan." 

A  fierce  exchange  of  notes  followed.  "Don't  you  under- 
stand the  fellow's  a  polygamist?"  Peter  wrote.  "He  keeps 
his  women  in  purdah.  No  decent  woman  could  be  talked 
to  in  India  as  he  talked  to  you.  Not  even  an  introduction. 
Personally,  I've  no  objection  to  any  friends  you  make  pro- 
vided they  are  decent  friends.  ..." 

"He  isn't  a  polygamist,"  Joan  replied.  "I've  asked  him. 
And  every  one  says  he's  a  first-rate  cricketer.  As  for  de- 
cent friends,  Peter " 

The  issue  had  been  still  undecided  when  they  came  down 
for  the  Christmas  vacation. 

So  far  Joan  had  maintained  her  positions  without  pas- 
sion. But  now  suddenly  her  indignation  at  Peter's  inter- 
ference flared  to  heaven.  That  he  should  come  here,  hot 
from  Soho,  to  tyrannize  over  her!  Indians  indeed!  As  if 
Hetty  Reinhart  wasn  't  worse  than  a  Gold  Coast  nigger !  .  .  . 

The  only  outward  manifestation  of  this  wild  storm  of 
resentment  had  been  her  one  instant's  scowl  at  Peter. 
Thereafter  Joan  became  again  the  quiet,  intelligently  watch- 
ful young  woman  she  had  been  all  that  evening.  But  now 
she  turned  herself  through  an  angle  of  about  thirty  degrees 
towards  Huntley,  who  was  talking  to  old  Mrs.  Jex,  the  won- 
der of  Hampstead,  who  used  to  know  George  Eliot  and  Hux- 
ley, the  while  he  was  regarding  Joan  with  sidelong  covetous- 
ness.  Joan  lifted  her  eyes  towards  him  with  an  expression 
of  innocent  interest.  The  slightly  projecting  blue  eyes 
seemed  to  leap  in  response. 

Mrs.  Jex  was  always  rather  inattentive  to  her  listener 
when  she  was  reciting  her  reminiscences,  and  Huntley  was 
able  to  turn  away  from  her  quietly  without  interrupting  the 
flow. 

The  Sheldrick  circle  scorned  the  formalities  of  introduc- 
tions. "Are  you  from  the  Slade  school!"  said  Huntley. 

"Cambridge,"  said  Joan. 


338  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"My  name's  Gavan  Huntley." 

But  this  was  going  to  be  more  amusing  than  Joan  had 
expected.  This  was  a  real  live  novelist — Joan's  first.  Not 
a  fortnight  ago  she  had  read  The  Pernambuco  Bunshop, 
and  thought  it  rather  clever  and  silly. 

"Not  the  Gavan  Huntley?"  she  said. 

His  face  became  faintly  luminous  with  satisfaction. 
"Just  Gavan  Huntley,"  he  said  with  a  large  smile. 

"The  Pernambuco  Bunshop?"  she  said. 

"Guilty,"  he  pleaded,  smiling  still  more  naively. 

One  had  expected  something  much  less  natural  in  a  nov- 
elist. 

"I  loved  it,"  said  Joan,  and  Huntley  was  hers  to  do  what 
she  liked  with.  Joan's  idea  of  a  proper  conversation  re- 
quired it  to  be  in  a  corner.  ' ' Do  Sheldrieks  never  sit  down  ? ' ' 
she  asked.  "I've  been  standing  all  the  evening." 

"They  can't,"  he  said  confidentially.  "They're  the  other 
sort  of  Dutch  doll,  the  cheap  sort,  that  hasn't  got  joints  at 
the  knees." 

"Antonia  sometimes  leans  against  the  wall." 

"Her  utmost.  The  next  thing  would  be  to  sit  on  the  floor 
with  her  legs  straight  out.  I've  seen  her  do  that.  But 
there  is  a  sort  of  bench  on  the  staircase  landing." 

Thither  they  made  their  way,  and  there  presently  Peter 
found  them. 

He  found  them  because  he  was  making  for  that  very 
corner  in  the  company  of  Sydney  Sheldrick.  * '  Hullo ! ' ' 
said  Sydney.  "That  you,  Joan?" 

"We've  taken  this  corner  for  the  evening,"  said  Hunt- 
ley,  laying  a  controlling  hand  on  Joan's  pretty  wrist. 

Joan  and  Peter  regarded  each  other  darkly. 

"There  ought  to  be  more  seats  about  somewhere,"  said 
Sydney.  "Come  up  to  the  divan,  old  Peter.  ..." 

Of  course  Peter  must  object  to  Huntley.  They  were 
scarcely  out  of  the  Sheldricks'  house  when  he  began. 
"That  man  Huntley 's  a  bad  egg,  Joan.  Everybody 
knows  it." 

For  a  time  they  disputed  about  Huntley. 

"Peter,"  said  Joan,  with  affected  calm,  "is  there  any  man, 
do  you  think,  to  whom  so — so  untrustworthy  a  girl  as  I  am 
might  safely  talk?" 


ADOLESCENCE  339 

Peter  seemed  to  consider.  "There's  chaps  like  Troop," 
he  said. 

"Troop  !"  said  Joan,  relying  on  her  intonation. 

"It  isn't  that  you're  untrustworthy,"  said  Peter. 

"Fragile?" 

"It's  the  look  and  tone  of  things." 

"I  wonder  how  you  get  these  ideas." 

"What  ideas?" 

"Of  how  I  behave  in  a  corner  with  Jelalludin  or  Gavan 
Huntley." 

"I  haven't  suggested  anything." 

"You've  suggested  everything.  Do  you  think  I  collect 
stray  kisses  like  Sydney  Sheldrick?  Do  you  think  I'm  a 
dirty  little— little — cocotte  like  Hetty  Eeinhart?" 

"Joan/" 

"Well,"  said  Joan  savagely,  and  said  no  more. 

Peter  came  to  the  defence  of  Hetty  belatedly.  "How  can 
you  say  such  things  of  Hetty?"  he  asked.  "What  can  you 
know  about  her?" 

' '  Pah !  I  can  smell  what  she  is  across  a  room.  Do  you 
think  I'm  an  absolute  young  fool,  Peter?" 

"You've  got  no  right,  Joan— 

"Why  argue,  Peter,  why  argue?  When  things  are  plain. 
Can't  you  go  your  own  way,  Peter" — Joan  was  annoyed  to 
find  suddenly  that  she  was  weeping.  Tears  were  running 
down  her  face.  But  the  road  was  dark,  and  perhaps  if  she 
gave  no  sign  Peter  would  not  see.  "You  go  your  own  way, 
Peter,  go  your  own  way,  and  let  me  go  mine." 

Peter  was  silent  for  a  little  while.  Then  compunction 
betrayed  itself  in  his  voice. 

"It's  you  I'm  thinking  of,  Joan.  I  can't  bear  to  see  you 
make  yourself  cheap." 

"Cheap!     And  you f" 

"I'm  different.     I'm  altogether  different.    A  man  is." 

Silence  for  a  time.  Joan  seemed  to  push  back  her  hair, 
and  so  smeared  the  tears  from  her  face. 

"We  interfere  with  each  other,"  she  said  at  last.  "We 
interfere  with  each  other.  What  is  the  good  of  it?  You've 
got  to  go  your  way  and  I've  got  to  go  mine.  We  used  to 
have  fun — lots  of  fun.  Now.  , 


340  JOAN  AND  PETER 

She  couldn't  say  any  more  for  a  while. 

"I'm  going  my  own  way,  Peter.  It's  a  different  way 

Leave  me  alone.  Keep  off!" 

They  said  no  more.  When  they  got  in  they  found  Mist; 
Jepson  sitting  by  the  fire,  and  she  had  got  them  some 
cocoa  and  biscuits.  The  headache  that  had  kept  her  from 
the  Sheldrick  festival  had  lifted,  and  Joan  plunged  at  once 
into  a  gay  account  of  the  various  people  she  had  seen  that 
evening — saving  and  excepting  (iavan  Huntley.  But  Peter 
stood  by  the  fireplace,  silent,  looking  down  into  the  fire,  sulk- 
ing or  grieving.  All  the  while  that  Joan  rattled  on  to  Miss 
Jepson  she  was  watching  him  with  almost  imperceptible 
glances  and  wondering  whether  he  sulked  or  grieved.  Did 
he  feel  as  she  felt?  If  he  sulked — well,  confound  him! 
But  what  if  this  perplexing  dissension  hurt  him  as  much  as 
it  was  hurting  her ! 

§  18 

Joan  had  long  since  lost  that  happiness,  that  perfect 
assurance,  that  intense  appreciation  of  the  beauty  in  things 
which  had  come  to  her  with  early  adolescence.  She  \va« 
troubled  and  perplexed  in  all  her  ways.  She  was  full  now 
of  stormy,  indistinct  desires  and  fears,  and  a  gnawing,  in- 
definite impatience.  No  religion  had  convinced  her  of  a  pur- 
pose in  her  life,  neither  Ilighmorton  nor  Cambridge  had 
suggested  any  mundane  devotion  to  her,  nor  pointed  her 
ambitions  to  a  career.  The  only  career  these  feminine  schools 
and  colleges  recognized  was  a  career  of  academic  successes 
and  High  School  teaching,  intercalated  with  hunger  strikes 
for  the  Vote,  and  Joan  had  early  decided  she  would  rather 
die  than  teach  in  a  High  School.  Nor  had  she  the  quiet 
assurance  her  own  beauty  would  have  given  her  in  an  earlier 
generation  of  a  discreet  choice  of  lovers  and  marriage  and 
living  "happily  ever  afterwards."  She  had  a  horror  oi' 
marriage  lurking  in  her  composition;  Mrs.  Pybus  and  Iligh- 
morton had  each  contributed  to  that ;  every  one  around  her 
spoke  of  it  as  an  entire  abandonment  of  freedom.  More- 
over there  was  this  quecrness  about  her  birth — she  was  be- 
ginning to  understand  better  now  in  what  that  queernes* 


ADOLESCENCE  341 

consisted — that  seemed  to  put  her  outside  the  customary 
ceremonies  of  veil  and  orange  blossoms.  Why  did  they  not 
tell  her  all  about  it — what  her  mother  was  and  where  her 
mother  was?  It  must  be  a  pretty  awful  business,  if  neither 
Aunt  Phyllis  nor  Aunt  Phoebe  would  ever  allude  to  it. 
It  would  have  to  come  out — perhaps  some  monstrous  story — 
before  she  could  marry.  And  who  could  one  marry?  She 
could  not  conceive  herself  marrying  any  of  these  boys  she 
met,  living  somewhere  cooped  up  in  a  little  house  with  sol- 
emn old  Troop,  or  under  the  pursuing  eyes,  the  convulsive 
worship,  of  Wilmington.  She  had  no  object  in  life,  no  star 
by  which  to  steer,  and  she  was  full  of  the  fever  of  life.  She 
was  getting  awfully  old.  She  was  eighteen.  She  was  nine- 
teen. Soon  she  would  be  twenty. 

All  her  being,  in  her  destitution  of  any  other  aim  that 
had  the  slightest  hold  upon  her  imagination,  was  crying  out 
for  a  lover. 

It  was  a  lover  she  wanted,  not  a  husband ;  her  mind  made 
the  clearest  distinction  between  the  two.  He  would  come 
and  unrest  would  cease,  confusion  would  cease  and  beauty 
would  return.  Her  lover  haunted  all  her  life,  an  invisible 
yet  almost  present  person.  She  could  not  imagine  his  face 
nor  his  form,  he  was  the  blankest  of  beings,  and  yet  she  was 
io  sure  she  knew  him  that  if  she  were  to  see  him  away  down 
a  street  or  across  a  crowded  room,  instantly,  she  believed, 
she  would  recognize  him.  And  until  he  came  life  was  a 
torment  of  suspense.  Life  was  all  wrong  and  discordant,  so 
wrong  and  discordant  that  at  times  she  could  have  hated 
her  lover  for  keeping  her  waiting  so  wretchedly. 

And  she  had  to  go  on  as  though  this  suspense  was  noth- 
ing. She  had  to  disregard  this  vast  impatience  of  her  being. 
And  the  best  way  to  do  that,  it  seemed  to  her,  was  to  hurry 
from  one  employment  to  another,  never  to  be  alone,  never 
without  some  occupation,  some  excitement.  Her  break  with 
Peter  had  an  extraordinary  effect  of  release  in  her  mind. 
Hitherto,  whatever  her  resentment  had  been  she  had  admitted 
in  practice  his  claim  to  exact  a  certain  discretion  from  her; 
his  opinion  had  been,  in  spite  of  her  resentment,  a  standard 
for  her.  Now  she  had  no  standard  at  all — unless  it  was  a 
rebellious  purpose  to  spite  him.  On  Joan's  personal  con- 


342  JOAN  AND  PETER 

duct  the  thought  of  Oswald,  oddly  enough,  had  scarcely  any 
influence  at  all.  She  adored  him  as  oue  might  a  political  or 
historical  hero;  she  wanted  to  stand  well  in  his  sight,  but 
the  idea  of  him  did  not  pursue  her  into  the  details  of  her 
behaviour  at  all.  He  seemed  preoccupied  with  ideas  and 
unobservant.  She  had  never  had  any  struggle  with  him;  he 
had  never  made  her  do  anything.  And  as  for  Aunts  Phyllis 
and  Phcebe — while  the  latter  seemed  to  make  vague  ges- 
tures towards  quite  unutterable  liberties,  the  former  main- 
tained an  attitude  of  nervous  disavowal.  She  was  a  woman 
far  too  uncertain-minded  for  plain  speaking.  She  was  a 
dear.  Clearly  she  hated  cruelty  and  baseness;  except  in  re- 
gard to  such  things  she  set  no  bounds. 

Hitherto  Joan  had  had  a  very  few  flirtations;  the  ex- 
tremest  thing  upon  her  conscience  was  Bunny  Cuspard's 
kiss.  She  had  the  naturally  shilly-shally  of  a  girl ;  she  was 
strongly  moved  to  all  sorts  of  flirtings  and  experimentings 
with  love,  and  very  adventurous  and  curious  in  these  mat- 
ters; and  also  she  had  a  system  of  inhibitions,  pride,  hesita- 
tion, fastidiousness,  and  something  beyond  these  things,  a 
sense  of  some  ultimate  value  that  might  easily  be  lost,  that 
held  her  back.  Rebelling  against  Peter  had  somehow  also 
set  her  rebelling  against  these  restraints.  Why  shouldn't  she 
know  this  and  that?  Why  shouldn't  she  try  this  and  that? 
Why,  for  instance,  was  she  always  "shutting  up"  Adela 
whenever  she  began  to  discourse  in  her  peculiar  way  upon 
the  great  theme?  Just  a  timid  prude  she  had  been,  but 
now . 

And  all  this  about  undesirable  people  and  unseemly  places, 
all  this  picking  and  choosing  as  though  the  world  was  mud ; 
what  nonsense  it  was !  She  could  take  care  of  herself  surely ! 

She  began  deliberately  to  feel  her  way  through  all  her 
friendships  to  see  whether  this  thing,  passion,  lurked  in  any 
of  them.  It  was  an  interesting  exercise  of  her  wits  to  try 
over  a  youth  like  old  Troop,  for  example ;  to  lure  him  on  by 
a  touch  of  flattery,  a  betrayal  of  warmth  in  her  interest,  to 
reciprocal  advances.  At  first  Troop  wasn  't  in  the  least  in  love 
with  her,  but  she  succeeded  in  suggesting  to  him  that  he  was. 
But  the  passion  in  him  released  an  unsuspected  fund  of  ego- 
tistical discourse;  he  developed  a  disposition  to  explain  him- 


ADOLESCENCE  343 

self  and  his  mental  operations  in  a  large,  flattering  way 
both  by  word  of  mouth  and  by  letter.  Even  when  he  was 
roused  to  a  sense  of  her  as  lovable,  he  did  not  become  really 
interested  in  her  but  only  in  his  love  for  her.  He  arrived  at 
one  stride  at  the  same  unaualytical  acceptance  of  her  as  of 
his  God  and  the  Church  and  the  King  and  his  parents  and 
all  the  rest  of  the  Anglican  system  of  things.  She  was  his 
girl — ''the  kid."  He  really  wasn't  interested  in  those  other 
things  any  more  than  he  was  in  her;  once  he  had  given  her 
her  role  in  relation  to  him  his  attention  returned  to  himself. 
The  honour,  integrity,  and  perfection  of  Troop  were  the 
consuming  occupations  of  his  mind.  This  was  an  edifying 
thing  to  discover,  but  not  an  entertaining  thing  to  pursue; 
and  after  a  time  Joan  set  herself  to  avoid,  miss,  and  escape 
from  Troop  on  every  possible  occasion.  But  Troop  prided 
himself  upon  his  persistence.  He  took  to  writing  her  im- 
mense, ill-spelt,  manly  letters,  with  sentences  beginning: 

"You  understand  me  very  little  if ."  It  was  clear 

he  was  hers  only  until  some  simpler,  purer,  more  receptive 
and  acquisitive  girl  swam  into  his  ken. 

Wilmington,  on  the  other  hand,  was  a  silent  covetous  lover. 
Joan  could  make  him  go  white,  but  she  could  not  make  him 
talk.  She  was  a  little  afraid  of  him  and  quite  sure  of  him. 
But  he  was  not  the  sort  of  young  man  one  can  play  with,  and 
she  marvelled  greatly  that  any  one  could  desire  her  so  much 
and  amuse  her  so  little.  Bunny  Cuspard  was  a  more  ani- 
mated subject  for  experiment,  and  you  could  play  with  him 
a  lot.  He  danced  impudently.  He  could  pat  Joan's  shoul- 
der, press  her  hand,  slip  his  arm  round  her  waist  and  bring 
his  warm  face  almost  to  a  kissing  contact  as  though  it  was 
all  nothing.  Did  these  approaches  warm  her  blood?  Did 
she  warm  his?  Anyhow  it  didn't  matter,  and  it  wasn't  any- 
thing. 

Then  there  was  Graham  Prothero,  a  very  good-looking 
friend  of  Peter's,  whom  she  had  met  while  skating.  He  had 
a  lively  eye,  and  jumped  after  a  meeting  or  so  straight  into 
Joan's  dreams,  where  he  was  still  more  lively  and  good- 
looking.  She  wished  she  knew  more  certainly  whether  she 
had  got  into  his  dreams. 

Meanwhile  Joan's   curiosity  had   not  spared  Jelalludin. 


344  JOAN  AND  PETER 

She  had  had  him  discoursing  on  the  beauties  of  Indian  love, 
and  spinning  for  her  imagination  a  warm  moonlight  vision 
of  still  temples  reflected  in  water  tanks,  of  silvery  water 
shining  between  great  lily  leaves,  of  music  like  the  throb- 
bing of  a  nerve,  of  brown  bodies  garlanded  with  flowers. 
There  had  been  a  loan  of  Rabindranath  Tagore's  love  poems. 
And  once  he  had  sent  her  some  flowers. 

Any  of  these  youths  she  could  make  her  definite  lover  she 
knew,  by  an  act  of  self-adaptation  and  just  a  little  recipro- 
cal giving.  Only  she  had  no  will  to  do  that.  She  felt  she 
must  not  will  anything  of  the  sort.  The  thing  must  come 
to  her;  it  must  take  possession  of  her.  Sometimes,  indeed, 
she  had  the  oddest  fancy  that  perhaps  suddenly  one  of  these 
young  men  would  become  transfigured ;  would  cease  to  be  his 
clumsy,  ineffective  self,  and  change  right  into  that  wonderful, 
that  compelling  being  who  was  to  set  all  things  right.  There 
were  moments  when  it  seemed  about  to  happen.  And  then 
the  illusion  passed,  and  she  saw  clearly  that  it  was  just  old 
Bunny  or  just  staccato  Mir  Jelalludin. 

In  Huntley,  Joan  found  something  more  intriguing  than 
this  pursuit  of  the  easy  and  the  innocent.  Huntley  talked 
with  a  skilful  impudence  that  made  a  bold  choice  of  topics 
seem  the  most  natural  in  the  world.  He  presented  himself  as 
a  leader  in  a  great  emancipation  of  women.  They  were 
to  be  freed  frojn  "the  bondage  of  sex."  The  phrase 
awakened  a  warm  response  in  Joan,  who  was  finding  sex  a 
yoke  about  her  imagination.  Sex,  Huntley  declared,  should 
be  as  incidental  in  a  woman's  life  as  it  was  in  a  man's.  But 
before  that  could  happen  the  world  must  free  its  mind  from 
the  "superstition  of  chastity,"  from  the  idea  that  by  one 
single  step  a  woman  passed  from  the  recognizable  into  an 
impossible  category.  We  made  no  such  distinction  in  the 
case  of  men ;  an  artist  or  a  business  man  was  not  suddenly 
thrust  out  of  the  social  system  by  a  sexual  incident.  A 
woman  was  either  Mrs.  or  Miss;  a  gross  publication  of  ele- 
mental facts  that  were  surely  her  private  affair.  No  one 
asked  whether  a  man  had  found  his  lover.  Why  should  one 
proclaim  it  in  the  case  of  a  woman  by  a  conspicuous  change 
of  her  name?  Here,  and  not  in  any  matter  of  votes  or 
economics  was  the  real  feminine  grievance.  His  indigna- 


ADOLESCENCE  345 

tion  was  contagious.  It  marched  with  all  Joan's  accumu- 
lated prejudice  against  marriage,  and  all  her  growing  re- 
gentment  at  the  way  in  which  emotional  unrest  was  distract- 
ing and  perplexing  her  will  and  spoiling  her  work  at  Cam- 
bridge. But  when  Iluntley  went  on  to  suggest  that  the 
path  to  freedom  lay  in  the  heroic  abandonment  of  the  "fetish 
of  chastity,"  Joan  was  sensible  of  a  certain  lagging  of  spirit. 
A  complex  of  instincts  that  conspired  to  adumbrate  that 
unseen,  unknown,  and  yet  tyrannous  lover,  who  would  not 
leave  her  in  peace  and  yet  would  not  reveal  himself,  stood 
between  her  and  the  extremities  of  Huntley's  logic. 

There  were  moments  when  he  seemed  to  be  pretending 
to  fill  that  oppressive  void ;  moments  when  he  seemed  only  to 
be  hinting  at  himself  as  a  possible  instrument  of  freedom. 
Joan  listened  to  him  gravely  enough  so  long  as  he  theori/ed; 
when  he  came  to  personal  things  she  treated  him  with  the 
same  experimental  and  indecisive  encouragement  that  she 
dealt  out  to  her  undergraduate  friends.  liuntley's  earlier 
pose  of  an  intellectual  friend  was  attractive  and  flattering; 
then  he  began  to  betray  passion,  as  it  were,  unwittingly.  At 
a  fancy  dress  dance  at  Chelsea — and  he  danced  almost  as  well 
as  Joan — he  became  moody.  He  was  handsome  that  night 
in  black  velvet  and  silver  that  betrayed  much  natural  grace; 
Joan  was  a  nondescript  in  black  and  red,  with  short  skirts 
and  red  beads  about  her  pretty  neck.  "Joan,"  he  said  sud- 
denly, "you're  getting  hold  of  me.  You're  disturbing  me." 
He  seemed  to  soliloquize.  "I've  not  felt  like  this  before." 
Then  very  flatteringly  and  reproachfully,  "You're  so 
damned  intelligent,  Joan.  And  you  dance — as  though  God 
made  you  to  make  me  happy."  He  got  her  out  into  an  open 
passage  that  led  from  the  big  studio  in  which  they  had  been 
dancing,  to  a  yard  dimly  lit  by  Chinese  lanterns,  and  at  the 
dark  turn  of  the  passage  kissed  her  more  suddenly  and  vio- 
lently than  she  had  ever  been  kissed  before.  He  kissed  her 
lips  and  held  her  until  she  struggled  out  of  his  arms.  Up 
to  that  moment  Joan  had  been  playing  with  him,  half  at- 
tracted and  half  shamming;  then  once  more  came  the  black 
panic  that  had  seized  her  with  Bunny  and  Adela. 

She  did  not  know  whether  she  liked  him  now  or  hated  him. 
She  felt  strange  and  excited.  She  made  him  go  back  with 


346  JOAN  AND  PETER 

her  into  the  studio.  "I've  got  to  dance  with  Ralph  Wiuter- 
baum, ' '  she  said. 

"Say  you're  not  offended,"  he  pleaded. 

She  gave  him  no  answer.  She  did  not  know  the  answer. 
She  wanted  to  get  away  and  think.  He  perceived  her  con- 
fused excitement  and  did  not  want  to  give  her  time  to  think. 
She  found  Winterbaum  and  danced  with  him,  and  all  the 
time,  with  her  nerves  on  fire,  she  was  watching  Huntley, 
and  he  was  watching  her.  Then  she  became  aware  of  Peter 
regarding  her  coldly,  over  the  plump  shoulder  of  a  fashion- 
plate  artist.  She  went  to  him  as  soon  as  the  dance  was  over. 

"Peter,"  she  said,  "I  want  to  go  home." 

He  surveyed  her.  She  was  flushed  and  ruffled,  and  his 
eyes  and  mouth  hardened. 

"It's  early." 

"I  want  to  go  home." 

"Right.     You're  a  bit  of  a  responsibility,  Joan." 

"Don't,  then,"  she  said  shortly,  and  turned  round  to  greet 
Huntley  as  though  nothing  had  happened  between  them. 

But  she  kept  in  the  light  and  the  crowd,  and  there  was  a 
constraint  between  them.  "I  want  to  talk  to  you  more,"  he 
said,  "and  when  we  can  talk  without  some  one  standing  on 
one's  toes  all  the  time  and  listening  hard.  I  wish  you'd 
come  to  my  flat  and  have  tea  with  me  one  day.  It's  still 
and  cosy,  and  I  could  tell  you  all  sorts  of  things — things  I 
can 't  tell  you  here. ' ' 

Joan's  dread  of  any  appearance  of  timid  virtue  was  over- 
whelming. And  she  was  now  blind  with  rage  at  Peter — 
why,  she  would  have  been  at  a  loss  to  say.  She  wanted  to 
behave  outrageously  with  Huntley.  But  in  Peter's  sight. 
This  struck  her  as  an  altogether  too  extensive  invitation. 

"I've  never  noticed  much  restraint  in  your  conversation," 
she  said. 

"It's  the  interruptions  I  don't  like,"  he  said. 

"You  get  me  no  ice,  you  get  me  no  lemonade,"  she  com- 
plained abruptly. 

"That's  what  my  dear  Aunt  Adelaide  used  to  call  chang- 
ing the  subject." 

"It's  the  cry  of  outraged  nature." 


ADOLESCENCE  347 

"But  I  saw  you  having  an  ice — not  half  an  hour  ago." 

"Not  the  ice  I  wanted,"  said  Joan. 

"Distracting  Joan!  I  suppose  I  must  get  you  that  ice. 
But  about  the  tea?" 

' '  I  hate  tea, ' '  said  Joan,  with  a  force  of  decision  that  for  a 
time  disposed  of  his  project. 

Just  for  a  moment  he  hovered  with  his  eye  on  her,  weigh- 
ing just  what  that  decision  amounted  to,  and  in  that  mo- 
ment she  decided  that  he  wasn't  handsome,  that  there  was 
something  unsound  about  his  profile,  that  he  was  pressing 
her  foolishly.  And  anyhow,  none  of  it  really  mattered.  He 
was  nothing  really.  She  had  been  a  fool  to  go  into  that  dark 
passage,  she  ought  to  have  known  her  man  better ;  Huntley 
had  been  amusing  hitherto  and  now  the  thing  had  got  into 
a  new  phase  that  wouldn't,  she  felt,  be  amusing  at  all;  after 
this  he  would  pester.  She  hated  being  kissed.  And  Peter 
was  a  beast.  Peter  was  a  hateful  beast.  .  .  . 

Joan  and  Peter  went  home  in  the  same  taxi — in  a  grim 
silence.  Tet  neither  of  them  could  have  told  what  it  was 
that  kept  them  hostile  and  silent. 

§  19 

But  Joan  and  Peter  were  not  always  grimly  silent  with  one 
another.  The  black  and  inexplicable  moods  came  and  passed 
again.  Between  these  perplexing  mute  conflicts  of  will,  they 
were  still  good  friends.  When  they  were  alone  together  they 
were  always  disposed  to  be  good  friends ;  it  was  the  presence 
and  excitement  and  competition  of  others  that  disturbed 
their  relationship;  it  was  when  the  species  invaded  their 
individualities  and  threatened  their  association  with  its  oc- 
cult and  passionate  demands.  They  would  motor-cycle  to- 
gether through  the  lanes  and  roads  of  Hertfordshire,  lunch 
cheerfully  at  wayside  inns,  brotherly  and  sisterly,  relapse 
again  into  mere  boy  and  girl  playfellows,  race  and  climb 
trees,  or,  like  fellow-students,  share  their  common  room 
amicably,  dispute  over  a  multitude  of  questions,  and  talk  to 
Oswald.  They  both  had  a  fair  share  of  scholarly  ambition 
and  read  pretty  hard.  They  had  both  now  reached  the 
newspaper-reading  stage.  Peter  was  beginning  to  take  an 


348  JOAN  AND  PETER 

interest  in  politics,  he  wanted  to  discuss  socialism  and  eco- 
nomic organization  thoroughly;  biological  work  alone  among 
all  scientific  studies  carries  a  philosophy  of  its  own  that 
illuminates  these  questions,  and  Oswald  was  happy  to  try 
over  his  current  interests  in  the  light  of  these  fresh,  keen 
young  minds.  Peter  was  a  discriminating  advocate  of  the 
ideas  of  Guild  socialism;  Oswald  was  still  a  cautious  indi- 
vidualist drifting  towards  Fabianism.  The  great  labour 
troubles  that  had  followed  the  Coronation  of  King  George 
had  been  necessary  to  convince  him  that  all  was  not  well  with 
the  economic  organization  of  the  empire.  Hitherto  he  had 
taken  economic  organization  for  granted;  it  wasn't  a  matter 
for  Sydenhams. 

Pelham  Ford  at  such  times  became  a  backwater  from  the 
main  current  of  human  affairs,  the  current  that  was  now 
growing  steadily  more  rapid  and  troubled.  Thinking  could 
go  on  at  Pelham  Ford.  There  were  still  forces  in  that  old- 
world  valley  to  resist  the  infection  of  intense  impatience 
that  was  spreading  throughout  the  world.  The  old  red  house 
behind  its  wall  and  iron  gates  seemed  as  stable  as  the  little 
hills  about  it;  the  road  and  the  row  of  great  trees  between 
the  stream  and  the  road,  the  high  pathway  and  the  ford  and 
the  village  promised  visibly  to  endure  for  a  thousand  years. 
It  was  when  Aunt  Phyllis  or  Aunt  Phcsbe  descended  upon 
the  place  to  make  a  party,  "get  a  lot  of  young  people  down 
and  brighten  things  up,"  or  when  the  two  youngsters  went 
to  London  together  into  the  Sheldrick  translation  of  the 
Quartier  Latin,  or  when  they  met  in  Cambridge  in  some 
crowded  chattering  room  that  imagination  grew  feverish, 
fierce  jealousies  awoke,  temperaments  jarred,  and  the  urge 
of  adolescence  had  them  in  its  clutch  again. 

It  was  during  one  of  these  parties  at  Pelham  Ford  that 
Joan  was  to  happen  upon  two  great  realizations,  realizations 
of  so  profound  an  effect  that  they  may  serve  to  mark  the  end 
for  her  of  this  great  process  of  emotional  upheaval  and  dis- 
covery that  is  called  adolescence.  They  left  her  shaped. 
They  came  to  her  in  no  dramatic  circumstances,  they  were 
mere  conversational  incidents,  but  their  effect  was  profound 
and  conclusive. 

In  the  New  Year  of  1914  Oswald  was  to  take  Peter  to 


ADOLESCENCE  349 

Eussia  for  three  weeks.  Before  his  departure,  Aunt  Phcebe 
had  insisted  that  there  should  be  a  Christmas  gathering  of 
the  young  at  Pelham  Ford.  They  would  skate  or  walk  or 
toboggan  or  play  hockey  by  day,  and  dress  up  and  dance  or 
improvize  charades  and  burlesques  in  the  evening.  One  or 
two  Sheldricks  v/ould  come,  Peter  and  Joan  could  bring 
down  any  stray  friends  who  had  no  home  Christmas  to  call 
them,  and  Aunts  Phyllis  and  Phcebe  would  collect  a  few 
young  people  in  London. 

The  gathering  was  from  the  first  miscellaneous.  Christ- 
mas is  a  homing  time  for  the  undergraduates  of  both  sexes, 
such  modern  spirits  as  the  home  failed  to  attract  used  to  go 
in  those  days  in  great  droves  to  the  Swiss  winter  sports,  and 
Joan  found  nobody  but  an  ambitious  Scotch  girl  whom  she 
knew  but  slightly  and  Miss  Scroby  the  historian,  who  was 
rather  a  friend  for  Aunt  Phyllis  than  herself.  Peter  discov- 
ered that  Wilmington  intensely  preferred  Pelham  Ford  to 
his  parental  roof,  and  brought  also  two  other  stray  men, 
orphans.  This  selection  was  supplemented  by  Aunt  Phcebe, 
who  had  latterly  made  Hetty  Keinhart  her  especial  protegee. 
She  descanted  upon  the  obvious  beauty  of  Hetty  and  upon 
the  courage  that  had  induced  Hetty  to  leave  her  home  in 
Preston  and  manage  for  herself  in  a  great  lonely  studio 
upon  Haverstock  Hill.  "The  bachelor  woman,"  said  Aunt 
Phoebe;  "armed  with  a  latchkey  and  her  purity.  A  vote 
shall  follow.  Hetty  is  not  one  of  the  devoted  yet.  But  I 
have  my  hopes.  "We  need  our  Beauty  Chorus.  Hetty  shall 
be  our  Helen,  and  Holloway  our  Troy." 

So  with  Peter's  approval  Hetty  was  added  to  the  list  be- 
fore Joan  could  express  an  opinion,  and  appeared  with  a 
moderate  sized  valise  that  contained  some  extremely  exiguous 
evening  costumes,  and  a  steadfast  eye  that  rested  most  fre- 
quently on  Peter.  In  addition  Aunt  Phcebe  brought  two 
Irish  sisters,  one  frivolous,  the  other  just  recuperating  from 
the  hunger-strike  that  had  ended  her  imprisonment  for  win- 
dow-breaking in  pursuit  of  the  Yote,  and  a  very  shy  youth 
of  seventeen,  Pryce,  the  caddie-poet.  Huntley  was  to  consti- 
tute a  sort  of  outside  element  in  the  party,  sharing  apart- 
ments with  young  Sopwith  Greene  the  musician,  in  the  vil- 
lage about  half  a  mile  away.  These  two  men  were  to  work 


350  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  keep  away  when  they  chose,  and  come  in  for  meals  and 
sports  as  they  thought  fit.  At  the  eleventh  hour  had  come  a 
pathetic  and  irresistible  telegram  from  Adela  Murchison : 

Alone  Xmas  may  I  come  wire  if  inconvenient. 

and  she,  too,  was  comprehended. 

The  vicarage  girls  were  available  for  games  and  meals 
except  on  Sunday  and  Christmas  Day;  there  was  a  friendly 
family  of  five  sons  and  two  daughters  at  Braughing,  a  chal- 
lenging hockey  club  at  Bishop 's  Stortford,  and  a  scratch  col- 
lection at  Newport  available  by  motor-car  for  a  pick-up 
match  if  the  weather  proved,  as  it  did  prove,  too  open  for 
skating. 

Oswald  commonly  stood  these  Aunt  parties  for  a  day  or 
so  and  then  retreated  to  the  Climax  Club.  Always  before- 
hand he  promised  himself  great  interest  and  pleasure  in  the 
company  of  a  number  of  exceptionally  bright  and  represen- 
tative youths  and  maidens  of  the  modern  school,  but  always 
the  actual  gathering  fatigued  him  and  distressed  him.  The 
youths  and  maidens  wouldn't  be  representative,  they  talked 
too  loud,  too  fast  and  too  inconsecutively  for  him,  their  wit 
was  too  rapid  and  hard — and  they  were  all  over  the  house. 
It  was  hard  to  get  mental  contacts  with  them.  They  paired 
off  when  there  were  no  games  afoot,  and  if  ever  talk  at  table 
ceased  to  be  fragmentary  Aunt  Phoebe  took  control  of  it.  In 
a  day  or  so  he  would  begin  to  feel  at  Pelham  Ford  like  a 
cat  during  a  removal ;  driven  out  of  his  dear  library,  which 
was  the  only  available  room  for  dancing,  he  would  try  to 
work  in  his  unaccustomed  study,  with  vivid,  interesting  young 
figures  passing  his  window  in  groups  of  two  or  three,  or  only 
too  audibly  discussing  the  world,  each  other,  and  their  gen- 
eral arrangements,  in  the  hall. 

His  home  would  have  felt  altogether  chaotic  to  him  but 
for  the  presence,  the  unswerving,  if  usually  invisible,  pres- 
ence of  Airs.  Moxton,  observing  times  and  seasons,  providing 
copious  suitable  meals,  dominating  by  means  of  the  gong,  re» 
placing  furniture  at  every  opportunity,  referring  with  a 
calm  dignity  to  Joan  as  the  hostess  for  all  the  rules  and  sanc- 
tions she  deemed  advisable.  From  unseen  points  of  view  one 
felt  her  eye.  One's  consolation  for  the  tumult  lay  in  one's 


ADOLESCENCE  351 

confidence  in  this  discretion  that  lay  behind  it.  Even  Aunt 
Phoebe's  way  of  speaking  of  "our  good  Moxton"  did  not 
mask  the  facts  of  the  case.  Pelham  Ford  was  ruled.  At 
Pelham  Ford  even  Aunt  Phrebe  came  down  to  meals  in  time. 
At  Pelham  Ford  no  h're,  once  lit,  ever  went  out  before  it  was 
right  for  it  to  do  so.  You  might  in  pursuit  of  facetious 
ends  choose  to  put  your  pyjamas  outside  your  other  clothes, 
wrap  your  window  curtains  about  you,  sport  and  dance,  and 
finally,  drawn  off  to  some  other  end,  abandon  these  wrap- 
pings in  the  dining-room  or  on  the  settee  on  the  landing. 
When  you  went  to  bed  your  curtains  hung  primly  before 
your  window  again,  and  your  pyjamas  lay  folded  and  re- 
proved upon  your  bed. 

The  disposition  of  the  new  generation  to  change  its  clothes, 
adopt  fantastic  clothes,  and  at  any  reasonable  excuse  get 
right  out  of  its  clothes  altogether,  greatly  impressed  Oswald. 
Hetty  in  particular  betrayed  a  delight  in  the  beauties  of  her 
own  body  with  a  freedom  that  in  Oswald's  youth  was  per- 
mitted only  to  sculpture.  But  Adela  made  no  secrets  of 
her  plump  shoulders  and  arms,  and  Joan  struck  him  as  in- 
sensitive. Skimpiness  was  the  fashion  in  dress  at  that  time. 
No  doubt  it  was  all  for  the  best,  like  the  frankness  of  Spar- 
tan maidens.  And  another  thing  that  brought  a  flavour  of 
harsh  modernity  into  the  house  was  the  perpetual  music  and 
dancing  that  raged  about  it.  There  was  a  pianola  in  the 
common  room  of  Joan  and  Peter,  but  when  they  were  alone 
at  home  it  served  only  for  an  occasional  outbreak  of  Bach, 
or  Beethoven,  or  Chopin.  Now  it  was  in  a  state  of  almost 
continuous  eruption.  Aunt  Phyllis  had  ordered  a  number 
of  rolls  of  dance  music  from  the  Orchestrelle  library,  and 
in  addition  she  had  brought  down  a  gramophone.  Never  be- 
fore had  music  been  so  easy  in  the  world  as  it  was  in  those 
days.  In  Oswald's  youth  music,  good  music,  was  the  rare 
privilege  of  a  gifted  few,  one  heard  it  rarely  and  listened 
with  reverence.  Nowadays  Joan  could  run  through  a  big 
fragment  of  the  Ninth  Symphony,  giving  a  rendering  far 
better  than  any  but  a  highly  skilled  pianist  could  play,  while 
she  was  waiting  for  Peter  to  come  to  breakfast.  And  this 
Christmas  party  was  pervaded  with  One  Steps  and  Two 
Steps,  pianola  called  to  gramophone  and  gramophone  to 


352  JOAN  AND  PETER 

pianola,  and  tripping  feet  somewhere  never  failed  to  re- 
spond. Most  of  these  young  people  danced  with  the  wildest 
informality.  But  Hetty  and  the  youngest  Irish  girl  were 
serious  propagandists  of  certain  strange  American  dances, 
the  Bunny  Hug,  and  the  Fox  Trot;  Sopwith  Greene  and 
Adela  tangoed  and  were  getting  quite  good  at  it,  and  Hunt- 
ley  wanted  to  teach  Joan  an  Apache  dance.  Joan  danced 
by  rule  and  pattern  or  by  the  light  of  nature  as  occasion 
required. 

The  Christmas  dinner  was  at  one  o'clock,  a  large  disorderly 
festival.  Gavan  Huntley  and  Sopwith  Greene  came  in  for 
it.  Oswald  carved  a  turkey,  Aunt  Phyllis  dispensed  beef; 
the  room  was  darkened  and  the  pudding  was  brought  in 
flaming  blue  and  distributed  in  flickering  flames.  Mince- 
pies,  almonds  and  raisins,  Brazil  nuts,  oranges,  tangerines, 
Carlsbad  plums,  crystallized  fruits  and  candied  peel;  noth- 
ing was  missing  from  the  customary  feast.  Then  came  a 
mighty  banging  of  crackers,  pre-war  crackers,  containing 
elaborate  paper  costumes  and  preposterous  gifts.  Wilming- 
ton ate  little  and  Huntley. a  great  deal,  and  whenever  Joan 
glanced  at  them  they  seemed  to  be  looking  at  her.  Hetty, 
flushed  and  excited,  became  really  pretty  in  a  paper  cap  of 
liberty,  she  waved  a  small  tricolour  flag  and  knelt  up  in  her 
chair  to  pull  crackers  across  the  table;  Peter  won  a  paper 
cockscomb  and  was  moved  to  come  and  group  himself  under 
her  arm  and  crow  as  "Vive  la  France!"  The  two  Irish 
girls  started  an  abusive  but  genial  argument  with  Sopwith 
Greene  upon  the  Irish  question.  Aunt  Phcebe  sat  near  Aunt 
Phyllis  and  discoursed  on  whether  she  ought  to  go  to  prison 
for  the  Vote.  "I  try  to  assault  policemen,"  she  said.  "But 
they  elude  me."  One  of  Peter's  Cambridge  friends,  it  came 
to  light,  had  been  present  at  a  great  scene  in  which  Aunt 
Phoebe  had  figured.  He  emerged  from  his  social  obscurity 
and  described  the  affair  rather  amusingly. 

It  had  been  at  an  Anti-Suffrage  meeting  in  West  Ken- 
sington, and  Aunt  Phoebe  had  obtained  access  to  the  back 
row  of  the  platform  by  some  specious  device.  Among  the 
notabilities  in  front  Lady  Charlotte  Sydenham  and  her 
solicitor  had  figured.  Lady  Charlotte  had  entered  upon  that 
last  great  phase  in  a  woman's  life,  that  phase  known  to  the 


ADOLESCENCE  353 

vulgar  observer  as  ' '  old  lady 's  second  wind. "  It  is  a  phase 
often  of  great  Go  and  determination,  a  joy  to  the  irreverent 
young  and  a  marvel  and  terror  to  the  middle-aged.  She  had 
taken  to  politics,  plunged  into  public  speaking,  faced  audi- 
ences. It  was  the  Insurance  Act  of  1912  that  had  first  moved 
her  to  such  publicity.  Stung  by  the  outrageous  possibility  of 
independent-spirited  servants  she  had  given  up  her  usual  trip 
to  Italy  in  the  winter  and  stayed  to  combat  Lloyd  George. 
From  mere  subscriptions  and  drawing-room  conversations 
and  committees  to  drawing-room  meetings  and  at  last  to 
public  meetings  had  been  an  easy  series  of  steps  for  her. 
At  first  a  mere  bridling  indignation  on  the  platform,  she 
presently  spoke.  As  a  speaker  she  combined  reminiscences 
of  Queen  Elizabeth  at  Tilbury  and  Marie  Antoinette  on  the 
scaffold  with  vast  hiatuses  peculiar  to  herself.  "My  good 
people,"  she  would  say,  disregarding  the  more  conventional 
methods  of  opening,  "have  we  neglected  our  servants  or  have 
we  not?  Is  any  shop  Gal  or  factory  Gal  half  so  well  off  as 
a  servant  in  a  good  house?  Is  she?  I  ask.  The  food  alone! 
The  morals!  And  now  we  are  to  be  taxed  and  made  to  lick 
stamps  like  a  lot  of  galley-slaves  to  please  a  bumptious  little 
Welsh  solicitor!  For  my  part  I  shall  discontinue  all  my 
charitable  subscriptions  until  this  abominable  Act  is  struck 
off  the  Statute  Book.  Every  one.  And  as  for  buying  these 

Preposterous  stamps Bather  than  lick  a  stamp  I  will  eat 

skilly  in  prison.  Stamps  indeed.  I'd  as  soon  lick  the  man's 
boots.  That's  all  I  have  to  say,  Mr.  Chairman  (or  'My 
Lord,'  or  'Mrs.  Chairman,'  as  the  case  might  be).  I  hope  it 
will  be  enough.  Thank  you."  And  she  would  sit  down 
breathing  heavily  and  looking  for  eyes  to  meet. 

For  the  great  agitation  against  the  Insurance  Act  that 
sort  of  thing  sufficed,  but  when  it  came  to  testifying  against 
an  unwomanly  clamour  for  votes,  the  argument  became  more 
complicated  and  interruptions  difficult  to  handle,  and  after 
an  unpleasant  experience  when  she  was  only  able  to  repeat  in 
steadily  rising  tones,  "I  am  not  one  of  the  Shrieking  Sister- 
hood" ten  times  over  to  a  derisive  roomful,  she  decided  to 
adopt  the  more  feminine  expedient  of  a  spokesman.  She  had 
fallen  back  upon  Mr.  Grimes,  who  like  all  solicitors  had  his 
parliamentary  ambitions,  and  she  took  him  about  with  her 


354  JOAN  AND  PETER 

in  the  comfortable  brown  car  that  had  long  since  replaced  the 
white  horse,  and  sat  beside  him  while  he  spoke  and  approved 
of  him  with  both  hands.  Mr.  Grimes  had  been  addressing  the 
meeting  when  Aunt  Phcebe  made  her  interruption.  He  had 
been  arguing  that  the  unlitness  of  women  for  military  service 
debarred  them  from  the  Vote.  "Let  us  face  the  facts,"  he 
said,  drawing  the  air  in  between  his  teeth.  "Ultimately — 
ultimately  all  social  organization  rests  upon  Force. ' ' 

It  was  just  at  this  moment  that  cries  of  "Order,  Order," 
made  him  aware  of  a  feminine  figure  close  beside  him.  He 
turned  to  meet  the  heaving  wrath  of  Aunt  Phoebe's  face. 
There  was  just  an  instant's  scrutiny.  Then  he  remembered, 
he  remembered  everything,  and  with  a  wild  shriek  leapt  clean 
off  the  platform  upon  the  toes  of  the  front  row  of  the  audi- 
ence. 

"If  you  touch  me!"  he  screamed.  .  .  . 

The  young  man  told  the  incident  briefly  and  brightly. 

"Thereby  hangs  a  tale,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe  darkly,  and 
became  an  allusive  Sphinx  for  the  rest  of  the  dinner. 

"I  shook  that  man,"  she  said  at  last  to  Pryce. 

"What — him?"  said  Pryce,  staring  round-eyed  at  the 
young  man  from  Cambridge. 

"No,  the  man  at  the  meeting." 

"What — afterwards?"  said  Pryce,  lost  and  baffled. 

"No,"  said  Aunt  Phoebe;  "before." 

Pryce  tried  to  look  intelligent,  and  nodded  his  head  very 
fast  to  conceal  the  fear  and  confusion  in  his  mind. 

Amidst  all  these  voices  and  festivities  sat  Oswald,  with  a 
vast  paper  cap  shaped  rather  like  the  dome  of  a  Russian 
church  cocked  over  his  blind  side,  listening  distractedly, 
noting  this  and  that,  saying  little,  thinking  many  things. 

The  banquet  ended  at  last,  and  every  one  drifted  to  the 
library. 

Affairs  hovered  vaguely  for  a  time.  Peter  handed  ciga- 
rettes about.  Some  one  started  the  gramophone  with  a  Two 
Step  that  set  every  one  tripping.  Hetty  with  a  flush  on  her 
cheek  and  a  light  in  her  eyes  was  keeping  near  Peter;  she 
seized  upon  him  now  for  a  dance  that  was  also  an  embrace. 
Peter  laughed,  nothing  loath.  "Oh!  but  this  is  glorious!" 
panted  Hetty. 


ADOLESCENCE  355 

' '  Come  and  dance,  too,  Joan, ' '  said  Wilmington. 

"It's  stuffy!"  said  Joan. 

Oswald,  contemplating  a  retreat  to  his  study  armchair, 
found  her  presently  in  the  hall  dressed  to  go  out  with 
Huntley. 

"We're  going  over  the  hill  to  see  the  sunset,"  Joan  ex- 
plained. "  It 's  too  stuffy  in  there. ' ' 

Oswald  met  Huntley 's  large  grey  eye  for  a  moment.  He 
had  an  instinctive  distrust  of  Huntley.  But  on  the  other 
hand,  surely  Joan  had  brains  enough  and  fastidiousness 
enough  not  to  lose  her  head  with  this — this  phosphorescent 
fish  of  a  novelist. 

"Right-o,"  said  Oswald,  and  hovered  doubtfully. 

Aunt  Phoebe  appeared  on  the  landing  above  carrying  off  a 
rather  reluctant  Miss  Scroby  to  her  room  for  a  real  good 
talk;  a  crash  and  an  unmistakable  giggle  proclaimed  a  minor 
rag  in  progress  in  the  common  room  across  the  hall  in  which 
Sydney  Sheldrick  was  busy.  The  study  door  closed  on 
Oswald.  .  .  . 

Joan  and  Huntley  passed  by  outside  his  window.  He  sat 
down  in  front  of  his  fire,  poked  it  into  a  magnificent  blaze, 
lit  a  cigar  and  sat  thinking.  The  beat  of  dancing,  the  melody 
of  the  gramophone  and  a  multitude  of  less  distinct  sounds 
soaked  in  through  the  door  to  him. 

He  was,  he  reflected,  rather  like  a  strange  animal  among 
all  this  youth.  They  treated  him  as  something  remotely  old ; 
he  was  one-and-fifty,  and  yet  this  gregarious  stir  and  excite- 
ment that  brightened  their  eyes  and  quickened  their  blood 
stirred  him  too.  He  couldn't  help  a  feeling  of  envy;  he  had 
missed  so  much  in  his  life.  And  in  his  younger  days  the  pace 
had  been  slower.  These  young  people  were  actually  noisier, 
they  were  more  reckless,  they  did  more  and  went  further  than 
his  generation  had  gone.  In  his  time,  with  his  sort  of  people, 
there  had  been  the  virtuous  life  which  was,  one  had  to  admit 
it,  slow,  and  the  fast  life  which  was  noisily,  criminally, 
consciously  and  vulgarly  vicious.  This  generation  didn't 
seem  to  be  vicious,  and  was  anything  but  slow.  How  far  did 
they  go?  He  had  been  noting  little  things  between  Peter 
and  this  Reinhart  girl.  "What  were  they  up  to  between  them  ? 
He  didn't  understand.  "Was  she  manreuvring  to  marry  the 


356  JOAN  AND  PETER 

boy?  She  must  be  well  on  the  way  to  thirty,  twenty-six  or 
twenty-seven  perhaps,  she  hadn't  a  young  girl's  look  in  her 
eyes.  Was  she  just  amusing  herself  by  angling  for  calf- 
love? Was  she  making  a  fool  of  Peter?  Their  code  of 
manners  was  so  easy;  she  would  touch  his  hands,  and  once 
Peter  had  stroked  her  bare  forearm  as  it  lay  upon  the  table. 
She  had  looked  up  and  smiled.  Leaving  her  arm  on  the 
table.  One  could  not  conceive  of  Dolly  permitting  such 
things.  Was  this  an  age  of  daring  innocence,  or  what  was 
coming  to  the  young  people? 

Joan  seemed  more  dignified  than  the  others,  but  she,  too, 
had  her  quality  of  prematurity.  At  her  age  Dolly  had 
dressed  in  white  with  a  pink  sash.  At  least,  Dolly  must 
have  been  about  Joan's  age  when  first  he  had  seen  her. 
Eighteen — seventeen?  Of  course  a  year  or  so  makes  no  end 
of  difference  just  at  this  age.  .  .  . 

From  such  meditations  Oswald  was  roused  by  the  tumult 
of  a  car  outside.  He  took  a  wary  glimpse  from  his  window 
at  this  conveyance,  and  discovered  that  it  was  coloured  an 
unusual  bright  chocolate  colour,  and  had  its  chauffeur — a 
depressed-looking  individual — in  a  livery  to  match.  He 
went  out  into  the  hall  to  discover  the  large  presence,  the 
square  face,  the  "whisker,"  and  the  china-blue  eyes  of  Lady 
Charlotte  Sydenham.  He  knew  she  was  in  England,  but  he 
had  had  no  idea  she  was  near  enough  to  descend  upon  them. 
She  stood  in  the  doorway  surveying  the  Christmas  disorder 
of  the  hall.  Some  one  had  adorned  Oswald's  stuffed  heads 
with  paper  caps,  the  white  rhinoceros  was  particularly 
motherly  with  pink  bonnet-strings  under  its  throat,  a  box  of 
cigarettes  had  been  upset  on  the  table  amidst  various  hats, 
and  half  its  contents  were  on  the  floor,  which  was  also  littered 
with  scraps  of  torn  paper  from  the  crackers ;  from  the  open 
door  of  the  library  came  the  raucous  orchestration  of  the 
gramophone,  and  the  patter  and  swish  of  dancers. 

"I  thought  you'd  be  away,"  said  Aunt  Charlotte,  a  little 
checked  by  the  sight  of  Oswald.  "I'm  staying  at  Minchings 
on  my  way  to  sit  on  the  platform  at  Cambridge.  We  're  rais- 
ing money  to  get  those  brave  Ulstermen  guns.  Something 
has  to  be  done  if  these  Liberals  are  not  to  do  as  they  like  with 
us.  They  and  their  friends  the  priests.  But  I  knew  there  'd 


ADOLESCENCE  357 

be  a  party  here.     And  those  aunts.     So  I  came.  .  .  .  Who 
are  all  these  young1  people  you  have  about  ? ' ' 
'Miscellaneous  friends,"  said  Oswald. 
'You've  got  a  touch  of  grey  in  your  hair,"  she  noted. 
'I  must  get  a  big  blond  wig,"  he  said. 
'You  might  do  worse." 

'You're  looking  as  fresh  as  paint,"  he  remarked,  scruti- 
nizing her  steadfastly  bright  complexion.  ''Is  that  the  faith- 
ful Unwin  sitting  and  sniffing  in  the  car?  It's  a  rennet 
face." 

"She  can  sit,"  said  Lady  Charlotte.  "I  shan't  stay  ten 
minutes,  and  she's  got  a  hot-water  bottle  and  three  rugs. 
But  being  so  near  I  had  to  come  and  see  what  was  being  done 
with  those  wards  of  mine." 

"Former  wards,"  Oswald  interjected. 

"The  Gall  passed.  Where  is  Master  Stubland?  I'll  just 
look  at  him.  Is  he  one  of  these  people  making  a  noise  in 
here?" 

She  went  to  the  door  of  the  library  and  surveyed  the  scene 
with  an  aggressive  lorgnette.  The  furniture  had  been  thrust 
aside  with  haste  and  indignity,  the  rugs  rolled  up  from  the 
parquet  floor,  and  Babs  Sheldrick  was  presiding  over  the 
gramophone  and  helping  and  interrupting  Sydney  in  the 
instruction  of  Wilmington,  of  Peter  and  Hetty  and  of  Adela 
and  Sopwith  Greene  in  some  special  development  of  the  tango. 
All  the  young  people  still  wore  their  paper  caps  and  were 
heated  and  dishevelled.  In  the  window-seat  the  convalescent 
suffragette  was  showing  wrist  tricks  to  one  of  the  young  men 
from  Cambridge.  "Party!"  said  Lady  Charlotte.  "Hig- 
gledy-piggledy I  call  it.  Which  is  Peter?" 

Peter  was  indicated. 

"Well,  he's  grown!  Who's  that  fast-looking  girl  he's 
hugging?" 

Peter  detached  himself  from  Hetty  and  came  forward. 

His  ancient  terror  of  the  whisker-woman  still  hung  about 
him,  but  he  made  a  brave  show  of  courage.  "Glad  you've 
not  forgotten  us,  Lady  Charlotte,"  he  said. 

"Not  much  Stubland  about  him,"  she  remarked  to  Oswald. 
"There's  a  photograph  of  you  before  you  blew  your  face 
off—" 


358  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"It's  his  mother  he's  like,"  said  Oswald,  laying  a  hand  on 
Peter's  shoulder. 

"I  never  saw  a  family  harp  on  themselves  more  than  the 
Sydenhams,"  the  lady  declared.  "It's  like  the  Habsburg 
chin.  .  .  .  This  one  of  the  new  improper  dances,  Peter?" 

"Honi  soit,"  said  Peter. 

"People  have  been  whipped  at  the  cart's  tail  for  less.  In 
my  mother's  time  no  decent  woman  waltzed.  Even — in 
crinolines.  Now  a  waltz  isn't  close  enough  for  them." 

The  gramophone  came  to  an  end  and  choked.  "Thank 
goodness ! ' '  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"Won't  you  dance  yourself,  Lady  Charlotte?"  said  Peter, 
standing  up  to  her  politely. 

The  hard  blue  eye  regarded  him  with  a  slightly  impaired 
disfavour,  but  the  old  lady  made  no  reply. 

They  heard  the  startled  voice  of  the  youth  from  Cam- 
bridge. "It's  her!"  .  .  . 

But  the  sting  of  the  call  was  at  its  end. 

"So  that's  Peter,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  as  the  chauffeur 
and  Oswald  assisted  her  back  into  her  liver-coloured  car.  "I 
told  you  I  saw  the  Gal?" 

"Joan?" 

"I  passed  her  on  the  road  half  a  mile  from  here.  Came 
upon  her  and  her  'gentleman  friend' — I  suppose  she'd  call 
him — as  we  turned  a  corner.  A  snap-shot  so  to  speak.  It's 
the  walking-out  instinct.  Blood  will  tell.  I  saw  her,  but  she 
didn  't  see  me.  Lost,  she  was,  to  things  mundane.  But  it  was 
plain  enough  how  things  were.  A  tiff.  Some  lovers '  quarrel. 
Wake  up,  Unwin." 

"What  do  you  mean?" 

"What  I  say,"  said  Lady  Charlotte. 

"ThatfellowHuntley!" 

"Ha!  So  now  you'll  lock  the  stable  door!  What  else 
was  to  be  expected  ? ' ' 

"But  this  is  nonsense!" 

"I  may  be  mistaken.  I  hope  I  am  mistaken.  I  just  give 
you  my  impression.  I'm  not  a  fool,  Oswald,  though  it's 
always  been  your  pleasure  to  treat  me  as  one.  Time  shows. ' ' 

There  was  a  pause  while  rugs  with  loud  monograms  were 
adjusted  about  her. 


ADOLESCENCE  359 

"Well,  I'm  glad  I  came  over.  I  wanted  to  see  the  Great 
Experiment.  I  said  at  the  time  it  can't  end  well.  Bad  in 
the  beginnings.  No  woman  to  help  him — except  for  those 
two  "Weird  Sisters.  No  religion.  You  see!  The  boy's  a 
young  Impudence.  The  girl 's  in  some  mess  already.  What 
did  I  tell  you?" 

Oswald  was  late  with  his  recovery. 

' '  Look  here,  auntie !  you  keep  your  libellous  mind  off  my 
wards. ' ' 

"Home,  Parbury!"  said  Lady  Charlotte  to  the  chocolate- 
uniformed  chauffeur. 

She  fired  a  parting  shot. 

"I  warned  you  long  ago,  you'd  get  the  Gal  into  a  thor- 
oughly false  position.  ..." 

She  was  getting  away  after  her  raid  with  complete  impun- 
ity. Never  before  had  she  scored  like  this.  Was  Oswald 
growing  old?  She  made  her  farewell  of  him  with  a  stately 
gesture  of  head  and  hand.  She  departed  disconcertingly 
serene.  A  flood  of  belated  repartee  rushed  into  Oswald's 
mind.  But  except  for  a  violent  smell  of  petrol  and  a  cloud 
of  smoke  and  a  kind  of  big  scar  of  chocolate  on  the  retina 
nothing  remained  now  of  Lady  Charlotte. 

In  the  hall  he  paused  before  a  mirror  and  examined  that 
touch  of  grey. 

§  20 

But  it  had  not  been  a  lovers'  quarrel  that  had  blinded 
Joan  to  the  passing  automobile.  It  had  been  the  astounding 
discovery  of  her  real  relationship  to  Peter.  So  astounding 
had  that  been  that  at  the  moment  she  was  not  only  regardless 
of  the  passing  traffic  but  oblivious  of  Huntley  and  every 
other  circumstance  of  her  world. 

Huntley  was  not  one  of  those  people  who  love;  he  was  a 
pursuing  egotist  with  an  unwarrantable  scorn  for  the  intelli- 
gence of  his  fellow-creatures.  He  liked  to  argue  and  show 
people  that  they  were  wrong  in  a  calm,  scornful  manner ; 
The  Pernambuco  Bun-shop  was  a  very  sarcastic  work. 
He  was  violently  attracted  by  the  feminine  of  all  ages;  it 
fixed  his  attention  with  the  vast  possibilities  of  admiration 


360  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  triumph  it  offered  him.  And  he  had  greedy  desires. 
Joan  attracted  him  at  first  because  she  was  admired.  He 
saw  how  Wilmington  coveted  her.  She  had  a  prestige  in 
her  circle.  She  had,  too,  a  magnetism  of  her  own.  Before 
he  realized  the  slope  down  which  he  slid,  he  wanted  her  so 
badly  that  he  thought  he  was  passionately  in  love.  It  kept 
him  awake  of  nights,  and  distracted  him  from  his  work.  He 
did  not  want  to  marry  her.  That  was  against  his  principles. 
That  was  the  despicable  way  of  ordinary  human  beings.  He 
lived  on  a  higher  plane.  But  he  wanted  her  as  a  monkey 
wants  a  gold  watch — he  wanted  this  new,  fresh,  lovely  and 
beautiful  thing  just  to  handle  and  feel  as  his  own. 

There  was  little  charm  about  Huntley  and  less  companion- 
ship. He  was  too  arrogant  for  companionship.  But  he 
abounded  in  ideas,  he  knew  much,  and  so  he  interested  her. 
He  talked.  He  pursued  her  with  the  steadfast  scrutiny  of 
his  large  grey  eyes — and  with  arguments.  He  tried  to  argue 
and  manoeuvre  Joan  into  a  passionate  love  for  him. 

Well,  Joan  had  a  broad  brow;  she  thought  things  over;  she 
was  amenable  to  ideas. 

He  harped  on  "freedom."  He  carried  freedom  far  beyond 
the  tempered  liberties  of  ordinary  human  association.  Any 
ordinary  belief  was  by  his  standards  a  limitation  of  freedom. 
There  was  a  story  that  he  had  once  been  caught  burgling  a 
house  in  St.  John's  Wood  and  had  been  let  off  by  the  magis- 
trate only  because  the  crime  seemed  absolutely  motiveless. 
No  doubt  he  had  been  frying  to  convince  himself  of  his  free- 
dom from  prejudice  about  the  rights  of  property.  He  had 
an  obscure  idea  that  he  could  induce  Joan  to  plunge  into 
wild  depravities  merely  to  prove  himself  free  from  her  own 
decent  instincts.  But  he  was  ceasing  to  care  for  his  argu- 
ment if  only  he  could  induce  her. 

There  was  a  moment  when  he  said,  "Joan,  you  are  the  one 
woman" — he  always  called  her  a  woman — "who  could  make 
me  marry  her. ' ' 

'I'll  spare  you,"  said  Joan  succinctly. 

; Promise  me  that." 

'Promise." 

'Anyhow." 

'Anyhow." 


ADOLESCENCE  361 

On  this  Christmas  afternoon  he  discoursed  again  upon  free- 
dom. "You,  Joan,  might  be  the  freest  of  the  free,  if  only 
vou  chose.  You  are  absolutely  your  own  mistress.  Abso- 
lutely." 

"I  have  a  guardian,"  she  said. 

"You're  of  age." 

"No;  I'm  nineteen." 

"You — it  happens,  were  of  age  at  eighteen,  Joan."  He 
watched  her  face.  He  had  been  burning  to  get  to  this  point 
for  weeks.  "Even  about  your  birth  there  was  freedom." 

' '  So  you  know  that. ' ' 

"Icy  voice!  To  me  it  seems  the  grandest  thing.  When  I 
reflect  that  I,  alas !  was  born  in  loveless  holy  wedlock  I  grit 
my  teeth." 

"  Oh  !  I  don 't  care.     But  how  do  you  know  ? ' ' 

"It's  fairly  well  known,  Joan.  It's  no  very  elaborate 
secret.  I  've  got  a  little  volume  of  your  father's  poetry." 

She  hesitated.  "I  didn't  know  my  father  wrote  poetry," 
she  said. 

"It  was  all  Will  Sydenham  ever  did  that  was  worth  doing 
— except  launch  you  into  the  world.  He  was  a  dramatic 
critic  and  something  of  a  journalist,  I  believe.  Stoner  of  the 
Post  knew  him  quite  well.  But  all  this  is  ancient  history 
to  you." 

"It  isn't.     Nobody  has  told  me.  ...     I  didn't  know." 

"But  what  did  you  think?" 

"Never  mind  what  I  thought.  Every  one  doesn 't  talk  with 
your  freedom.  I've  never  been  told.  Who  was  my 
mother?" 

"Stoner  says  she  died  in  hospital.  Soon  after  you  were 
born.  He  never  knew  her  name." 

"Wasn't  it  Stubland?" 

'  '  Lord,  No !     Why  should  it  be  ? " 

"But  then ' 

"That's  one  of  the  things  that  makes  you  so  splendidly 
new,  Joan.  You  start  clean  in  the  world — like  a  new  Eve. 
Without  even  an  Adam  to  your  name.  Fatherless,  mother- 
less, sisterless,  brotherless.  You  fall  into  the  world  like  a 
meteor!" 

She  stood  astonished  at  the  way  in  which  she  had  blun- 


362  JOAN  AND  PETER 

dered.     Brotherless !     If  Huntley  had  not  drawn  her  back  by 
the  arm  Lady  Charlotte's  car  would  have  touched  her.  .  .  . 


§  21 

That  night  some  one  tapped  at  the  bedroom  door  of  Aunt 
Phyllis.  "Come  in,"  she  cried,  slipping  into  her  dressing- 
gown,  and  Joan  entered.  She  was  still  wearing  the  dress  of 
spangled  black  in  which  she  had  danced  with  Huntley  and 
Wilmington  and  Peter.  She  went  to  her  aunt's  tire  in  silence 
and  stood  over  it,  thinking. 

"You're  having  a  merry  Christmas,  little  Joan?"  said 
Aunt  Phyllis,  coming  and  standing  beside  her. 

"Ever  so  merry,  Auntie.     We  go  it — don't  we?" 

Aunt  Phyllis  looked  quickly  at  the  flushed  young  face 
beside  her,  opened  her  mouth  to  speak  and  said  nothing. 
There  was  a  silence,  it  seemed  a  long  silence,  between  them. 
Then  Joan  asked  in  a  voice  that  she  tried  to  make  off-hand, 
"Auntie.  Who  was  my  father?" 

Aunt  Phyllis  was  deliberately  matter-of-fact.  "He  was 
the  brother  of  Dolly — Peter's  mother." 

"Where  is  he?" 

"He  was  killed  by  an  omnibus  near  the  Elephant  and 
Castle  when  you  were  two  years  old." 

"And  my  mother?" 

"Died  three  weeks  after  you  were  born." 

Joan  was  wise  in  sociological  literature.  ' '  The  usual  fever, 
I  suppose,"  she  said. 

"Yes,"  said  Aunt  Phyllis. 

"Do  you  know  much  about  her?" 

"Very  little.  Her  name  was  Debenham.  Fanny  Deben- 
ham." 

"Was  she  pretty?" 

"I  never  saw  her.  It  was  Dolly — Peter's  mother — who 
went  to  her.  ..." 

"So  that's  what  I  am,"  said  Joan,  after  a  long  pause. 

"Only  we  love  you.  What  does  it  matter?  Dear  Joan 
of  my  heart,"  and  Aunt  Phyllis  slipped  her  arm  about  the 
girl's  shoulder. 


ADOLESCENCE  363 

But  Joan  stood  stiff  and  intent,  not  answering  her  caress. 

"I  knew — in  a  way,"  she  said. 

The  thought  that  consumed  her  insisted  upon  utterance. 
"'So  I'm  not  Peter's  half-sister,"  she  said. 

"But  have  you  thought ?" 

Joan  remained  purely  intellectual.  "I've  thought  dozens 
of  things.  And  I  thought  at  last  it  was  that.  .  .  .  Why  was 
I  called  Stubland?  I'm  not  a  Stubland." 

"It  was  more  convenient.     It  grew  up." 

"It  put  me  out.     It  has  sent  me  astray.  .  .  ." 

She  remained  for  a  time  taking  in  this  new  aspect  of  things 
so  intently  as  to  he  regardless  of  the  watcher  beside  her. 
Then  she  roused  herself  to  mask  her  extravagant  preoccupa- 
tion. "You're  no  relation  then  of  mine?"  she  said. 

"No." 

"You've  been  so  kind  to  me.    A  mother.  ..." 

Aunt  Phyllis  was  weeping  facile  tears.  "Have  I  been 
kind,  dear?  Have  I  seemed  kind?  I've  always  wanted  to 
be  kind.  And  I've  loved  you,  Joan,  my  dear.  And  love 
you." 

"And  Nobby?" 

"Nobby  too." 

"You've  been  bricks  to  me,  both  of  you.  No  end.  Aunt 

Phoebe  too.  And  Peter ?  Does  Peter  know?  Does  he 

know  what  I  am?" 

"I  don't  know.     I  don't  know  what  he  knows,  Joan." 

"If  it  hadn't  been  for  the  same  surname.  Joan  Deben- 
ham.  ...  I've  had  fancies.  I've  thought  Nobby,  perhaps, 
was  my  father.  .  .  .  Queer !  .  .  .  Why  did  you  people  bother 
yourselves  about  me  ? " 

"My  dear,  it  was  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world." 

"I  suppose  it  was — for  you.     You've  been  so  decent — 

"Every  woman  wants  a  daughter,"  said  Aunt  Phyllis  in 
a  whisper,  and  then  almost  inaudibly;  "you  are  mine." 

"And  the  tempers  I've  shown.  The  trouble  I've  been. 
All  these  years.  I  wonder  what  Peter  knows?  He  must 
suspect.  He  must  have  ideas.  .  .  .  EToan  Debenham — from 
outside." 

She  stood  quite  still  with  the  red  firelight  leaping  up  to 


364  JOAN  AND  PETER 

light  her  face,  and  caressing  the  graceful  lines  of  her  slender 
form.  She  stood  for  a  time  as  still  as  stone.  Had  she,  after 
all,  a  stony  heart  ?  Aunt  Phyllis  stood  watching  her  with  a 
pale,  tear-wet,  apprehensive  face.  Then  abruptly  the  girl 
turned  and  held  out  her  arms. 

"Can  I  ever  thank  you?"  she  cried,  with  eyes  that  now 
glittered  with  big  tears.  .  .  . 

Presently  Aunt  Phyllis  was  sitting  in  her  chair  stroking 
Joan 's  dark  hair,  and  Joan  was  kneeling,  staring  intently  at 
some  strange  vision  in  the  fire.  "Do  you  mind  my  staying 
for  a  time  ? ' '  she  asked.  ' '  I  want  to  get  used  to  it.  It's  just 
as  though  there  wasn't  anything — but  just  here.  I've  lost 
my  aunt — and  found  a  mother." 

"My  Joan,"  whispered  Aunt  Phyllis.  "My  own  dear 
Joan." 

"Always  I  have  thought  Peter  was  my  brother — always. 
My  half  brother.  Until  today. ' ' 


§  22 

It  was  Adela  who  inflicted  Joan's  second  shock  upon  her, 
and  drove  away  the  last  swirling  whispers  of  adolescent 
imaginations  and  moon  mist  from  the  hard  forms  of  reality. 
This  visit  she  had  seemed  greatly  improved  to  Joan ;  she  was 
graver.  Visibly  she  thought,  and  no  longer  was  her  rolling 
eye  an  invitation  to  masculine  enterprise.  She  came  to 
Joan's  room  on  Boxing  Day  morning  to  make  up  dresses 
with  her  for  the  night's  dance,  and  she  let  her  mind  run  as 
she  stitched.  Every  one  was  to  come  in  fancy  dress;  the 
vicarage  girls  would  come  and  the  Braughing  people.  Every 
one  was  to  represent  a  political  idea.  Adela  was  going  to  be 
Tariff  Reform.  All  her  clothes  were  to  be  tattered  and  un- 
finished, she  said,  even  her  shoes  were  to  have  holes.  She 
would  wear  a  broken  earring  in  one  ear.  "I  don't  quite  see 
your  point,"  said  Joan. 

"Tariff  Reform  means  work  for  all,  dear,"  Adela  ex- 
plained gently. 

Days  before  Joan  had  planned  to  represent  Indian  Nation- 
alism. It  was  a  subject  much  in  dispute  between  her  and 
Peter,  whose  attitude  to  India  and  Indians  seemed  to  her 


ADOLESCENCE  365 

unreasonably  reactionary — in  view  of  all  his  other  opinions. 
She  could  never  let  her  controversies  with  Peter  rest;  the 
costume  had  been  aimed  at  him.  She  was  going  to  make  up 
her  complexion  with  a  little  brown,  wear  a  sari,  sandals  on 
bare  feet,  and  a  band  of  tinsel  across  her  forehead.  She  had 
found  some  red  Indian  curtain  stuff  that  seemed  to  be  adapt- 
able for  the  sari.  She  worked  now  in  a  preoccupied  manner, 
with  her  mind  full  of  strange  thoughts.  Sometimes  she  lis- 
tened to  what  Adela  was  saying,  and  sometimes  she  was  alto- 
gether within  herself.  But  every  now  and  then  Adela  would 
pull  her  back  to  attention  by  a  question. 

" Don't  you  think  so,  Joan?" 

"Think  what?"  asked  Joan. 

' '  Love 's  much  more  our  business  than  it  is  theirs. ' ' 

That  struck  Joan.  "Is  it?"  she  asked.  She  had  thought 
the  shares  in  the  business  were  equal  and  opposite. 

"All  this  waiting  for  a  man  to  discover  himself  in  love 
with  you ;  it 's  rot.  You  may  wait  till  Doomsday. ' ' 

"Still,  they  do  seem  to  fall  in  love." 

' '  "With  any  one.  A  man 's  in  love  with  women  in  general, 
but  women  fall  in  love  with  men  in  particular.  We're  the 
choosers.  Naturally.  We  want  a  man,  that  man  and  no 
other,  and  all  our  own.  They  don't  feel  like  that.  And  we 
have  to  hang  about  pretending  they  choose  and  trying  to 
make  them  choose  without  seeming  to  try  to  make  them. 
Well,  we're  altering  all  that.  When  I  want  a  man " 

Adela 's  pause  suggested  a  particular  reference. 

"I'll  get  him  somehow,"  she  said  intently. 

"If  you  mean  to  get  him — if  you  don't  mind  much  the 
little  things  that  happen  meanwhile — you'll  get  him,"  said 
Adela,  as  though  she  repeated  a  creed.  "But,  of  course, 
you  can't  make  terms.  When  a  man  knows  that  a  woman  is 
his,  when  he's  sure  of  it — absolutely,  then  she's  got  him  for 
good.  Sooner  or  later  he  must  come  to  her.  I  haven't  had 
my  eyes  open  just  for  show,  Joan,  this  last  year  or  so." 

"Good  luck,  Adela,"  said  Joan. 

Adela  attempted  no  pretences.  "It  stands  to  reason  if  you 

love  a  man "  Her  eyes  filled  with  tears.  "Love  his 

very  self.  You  can  make  him  happy.and  safe.  Be  his  line  of 
least  resistance.  But  the  meanwhile  is  hard " 


366  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Adela  stitched  furiously. 

''That's  why  you  came  down  here?"  Joan  asked. 

"You  haven't  seen?"  Adela 's  preoccupation  with  Sop- 
with  Greene  had  been  the  most  conspicuous  fact  in  the  party. 
"Once  or  twice  a  gleam,"  said  Joan. 

"Ask  him  to  play  tonight,  dear,"  said  Adela.  "Some  of 
his  own  things." 

But  now  the  last  checks  upon  Adela 's  talk  were  removed. 
She  wanted  to  talk  endlessly  and  unrestrainedly  about  love. 
She  wanted  to  hear  herself  saying  all  the  generosities  and 
devotions  she  contemplated.  "There's  no  bargain  in  love," 
said  Adela.  "You  just  watch  and  give."  Running  through 
all  her  talk  was  a  thread  of  speculation ;  she  was  obsessed  by 
the  idea  of  the  relative  blindness  and  casual  ness  of  love  in 
men.  "We  used  to  dream  of  lovers  who  just  concentrated 
upon  us,"  she  said.  "But  there's  something  nimmy-pinimy 
in  a  man  concentrating  on  a  woman.  He  ought  to  have  a 
Job,  something  Big,  his  Art,  his  Aim — Something.  One 
wouldn't  really  respect  a  man  who  didn't  do  something  Big. 
Love's  a  nuisance  to  a  real  man,  a  disturbance,  until  some 
woman  takes  care  of  him. ' ' 

"Couldn't  two  people — take  care  of  each  other?"  asked 
Joan. 

"Oh,  that's  Ideal,  Joan,"  said  Adela  as  one  who  puts  a  no- 
tion aside.  "A  man  takes  his  love  where  he  finds  it.  On 
his  way  to  other  things.  The  easier  it  is  to  get  the  better 
he  likes  it.  That's  why,  so  often,  they  take  up  with  any — 
sort  of  creature.  And  why  one  needn't  be  so  tremendously 
jealous.  ..." 

Adela  reflected.  "1  don't  care  a  bit  about  him  and 
Hetty. ' ' 

"Hetty  Reinhart?" 

"Everybody  talked  about  them.  Didn't  you  hear?  But 
of  course  you  were  still  at  school.  Of  course  there's  that 
studio  of  hers.  You  know  about  her?  Yes.  She  has  a 
studio.  Most  convenient.  She  does  as  she  pleases.  It 
amused  him,  I  suppose.  Men  don't  care  as  we  do.  They're 
just  amused.  Men  can  fall  in  love  for  an  afternoon — and 
out  of  it  again.  He  makes  love  to  her  and  he's  not  even 


ADOLESCENCE  367 

jealous  of  her.  Not  a  bit.  He  doesn't  seem  to  mind  a  rap 
about  Peter." 

She  babbled  on,  but  Joan's  mind  stopped  short. 

"Adela,"  she  said,  "what  is  this  about  Hetty  and  Peter?" 

"The  usual  thing,  I  suppose,  dear.  You  don't  seem  to 
hear  of  anything  at  Cambridge." 

"But  you  don't  mean ?" 

"Well,  I  know  something  of  Hetty.     And  I've  got  eyes." 

"You  mean  to  say  she's — she's  got  Peter?" 

"It  shows  plainly  enough." 

"My  Peter!"  cried  Joan  sharply. 

"  You're  not  an  Egyptian  princess,"  said  Adela. 

"You  mean — he's  gone — Peter's  gone — to  her  studio? 
That — things  like  that  have  happened  ? ' ' 

Adela  stared  at  her  friend.  "These  things  have  to  hap- 
pen, Joan." 

"But  he's  only  a  boy  yet." 

"She  doesn't  think  he's  a  boy.  Why!  he's  almost  of  age! 
Lot  of  boy  about  Peter!" 

"But  do  you  mean ?" 

"I  don't  mean  anything,  Joan,  if  you're  going  to  look  like 
that.  You've  got  no  right  to  interfere  in  Peter's  love 
affairs.  Why  should  you?  Don't  we  all  live  for  experi- 
ence?" 

"But,"  said  Joan,  "Peter  is  different." 

"No.    No  one  is  different,"  said  Adela. 

"But  I  tell  you  he's  my  Peter." 

"He's  your  brother,  of  course." 

"No!" 

"Your  half  brother  then.  Everybody  knows  that,  Joan — 
thanks  to  the  Sheldrieks.  A  sister  can't  always  keep  her 
brothers  away  from  other  girls. ' ' 

Joan  was  on  the  verge  of  telling  Adela  that  she  was  not 
even  Peter's  half  sister,  but  she  restrained  herself.  She 
stuck  to  the  thing  that  most  concerned  her  now. 

"It's  spoiling  him,"  she  said.  "It  will  make  a  mess  of 
him.  Why!  he  may  think  that  is  love,  that! — slinking  off 
to  a  studio.  The  nastiness!  And  she's  had  a  dozen  lovers. 
She's  a  common  thing.  She  just  strips  herself  here  and 
skows  her  arms  and  shoulders  because  she's — just  that." 


368  JOAN  AND  PETER 

''She's  really  in  love  with  him  anyhow,"  said  Adela. 
"She's  gone  on  him.  It's  amusing." 

"Love!  That — love!  It  makes  me  sick  to  think  of  it," 
said  Joan. 

"A  man  isn't  made  like  that,"  said  Adela.  "Peter  has  to 
go  his  own  way." 

"Peter,"  said  Joan,  "who  used  to  be  the  cleanest  thing 
alive." 

' '  Good  sisters  always  feel  like  that, ' '  said  Adela.  * '  I  know 
how  shocked  I  was  when  first  I  heard  of  Teddy.  ...  It  isn't 
the  same  thing  to  men,  Joan.  It  isn't  indeed.  ..." 

"Dirt y  Peter,"  said  Joan  with  intense  conviction.  "Of 
course  I've  known.  Of  course  I've  known.  Any  one  could 
see.  Only  I  wouldn't  know." 

She  thrust  the  striped  red  stuff  for  her  Indian  dress  from 
her. 

"I  shan't  be  Indian  Nationalism,  Adela,  after  all.  Some- 
how I  don't  care  to  be.  Why  should  I  cover  myself  up  in 
this  way?" 

"You'd  look  jolly." 

"No.  I  want  something  with  black  in  it.  And  red.  And 
my  arms  and  shoulders  showing.  Why  shouldn  't  we  all  dress 
down  to  Hetty?  She  has  the  approval  of  the  authorities. 
Aunt  Phoebe  applauds  every  stitch  she  takes  off.  Freedom — 
with  a  cap  of  Liberty." 

"Hetty  said  something  about  being  Freedom,"  hesitated 
Adela. 

"Then  I  shall  come  as  Anarchy,"  said  Joan,  staring  at  the 
red  stuff  upon  the  table  before  her. 

Came  a  pause. 

"I  don't  see  why  Peter  should  have  all  the  fun  in  life," 
said  Joan. 

§  23 

Joan  as  Anarchy  made  a  success  that  evening  at  Pelham 
Ford.  In  the  private  plans  of  Hetty  Reinhart  that  success 
had  not  been  meant  for  Joan.  Hetty  as  Freedom  gave  the 
party  her  lithe  arms,  her  slender  neck,  and  so  much  of  her 
back  that  the  two  vicarage  girls,  who  had  come  very  correctly 


ADOLESCENCE  369 

in  powder  and  patches  as  AYhig  and  Tory,  were  sure  that  it 
was  partly  accidental.  On  Hetty's  dark  hair  perched  a 
Phrygian  cap,  and  she  had  a  tricolour  skirt  beneath  a  white 
bodice  that  was  chiefly  decolletage  and  lace.  About  her  neck 
was  a  little  band  of  black  which  had  nothing  to  do  with 
Freedom ;  it  was  there  for  the  sake  of  her  slender  neck.  She 
was  much  more  like  La  Vie  Parisienne.  She  was  already 
dancing  with  Peter  when  Joan,  who  had  delayed  coming 
down  until  the  music  began,  appeared  in  the  doorway. 
Nobby,  wrapped  in  a  long  toga-like  garment  of  sun-gold 
and  black  that  he  alleged  qualified  him  to  represent  Darkest 
Africa,  was  standing  by  the  door,  and  saw  the  effect  of  Joan 
upon  one  of  the  Braughing  boys  before  he  discovered  her 
beside  him. 

Her  profile  was  the  profile  of  a  savage.  She  lifted  her 
clear-cut  chin  as  young  savage  women  do,  and  her  steady  eyes 
regarded  Hetty  and  Peter.  Her  black  hair  was  quite  un- 
bound and  thrown  back  from  her  quiet  face,  and  there  was 
no  necklace,  no  bracelet,  not  a  scrap  of  adornment  nor  en- 
hancement upon  her  arms  or  throat.  It  had  not  hitherto 
occurred  to  Oswald  that  his  ward  had  the  most  beautiful 
neck  and  shoulders  in  the  world,  or  that  Joan  was  as  like 
what  Dolly  once  had  been  as  a  wild  beast  is  like  a  cherished 
tame  one.  But  he  did  presently  find  these  strange  ideas  in 
his  mind. 

Her  dress  was  an  exiguous  scheme  of  slashes  and  tatters 
in  black  and  bright  red.  She  was  bare  ankled — these  modern 
young  people  thought  nothing  of  that — but  she  had  white 
dancing  shoes  upon  her  feet. 

"Joan!"  said  Huntley,  advancing  with  an  air  of  pro- 
prietorship. 

"No,"  said  Joan  with  a  gesture  of  rejection.  "I  don't 
want  to  dance  with  any  one  in  particular.  I'm  going  to 
dance  alone." 

"Well — dance!"  said  Huntley  with  a  large  courtly  move- 
ment of  a  white  velvet  cloak  all  powdered  with  gold  crosses 
and  fleur-de-lys,  that  he  pretended  was  a  symbol  of  Reaction. 

"When  I  choose,"  said  Joan.     "And  as  I  choose." 

Across  the  room  Peter  was  staring  at  her,  and  she  was 
looking  at  Peter.  He  tripped  atrainst  Hetty,  and  for  a  little 


370  JOAN  AND  PETER 

interval  the  couple  was  out  of  step.  "Come  on,  Peter,"  said 
Hetty,  rallying  him. 

Joan  appeared  to  forget  Peter  and  every  one. 

There  was  dancing  in  her  blood,  and  this  evening  she 
meant  to  dance.  Her  body  felt  wonderfully  light  and  as 
supple  as  a  whip  under  her  meagre  costume.  There  was 
something  to  be  said  for  this  semi-nudity  after  all.  The 
others  were  dancing  a  two-step  with  such  variations  as  they 
thought  lit,  and  there  was  no  objection  whatever  at  Pelham 
Ford  to  solo  enterprises.  Joan  could  invent  dances.  She 
sailed  out  into  the  room  to  dance  as  she  pleased. 

Oswald  watched  her  nimble  steps  and  the  whirling  rhythms 
of  her  slender  body.  She  made  all  the  others  seem  over- 
dressed and  clumsy  and  heavy.  Her  face  had  a  grave  pre- 
occupied expression. 

Huntley  stood  for  a  moment  or  so  beside  Oswald,  and  then 
stepped  out  after  her  to  convert  her  dance  into  a  duet.  He 
too  was  a  skilful  and  inventive  dancer,  and  the  two  coquetted 
for  a  time  amidst  the  other  couples. 

Then  Joan  discovered  Wilmington  watching  her  and  Hunt- 
ley  from  the  window  bay.  She  danced  evasively  through 
Huntley 's  circling  entanglements,  and  seized  Wilmington's 
hand  and  drew  him  into  the  room. 

"I  can't  dance,  Joan,"  he  said,  obeying  her.  "You  know 
I  can't  dance." 

"You  have  to  dance,"  she  said,  aglow  and  breathing 
swiftly.  "Trust  me." 

She  took  and  left  his  hands  and  took  them  again  and  turned 
him  about  so  skilfully  that  a  wonderful  illusion  was  produced 
in  Wilmington's  mind  and  in  those  about  him  that  indeed  he 
could  dance.  Huntley  made  a  crouching  figure  of  jealousy 
about  them ;  he  spread  himself  and  his  cloak  into  fantastic 
rhombs — and  then  the  music  ceased.  .  .  . 

"The  Argentine  Tango!"  cried  Huntley.  "Joan,  you 
must  tango." 

"Never." 

"Dance  Columbine  to  my  Harlequin  then." 

"And  stand  on  your  knee?     I  should  break  it." 

"Try  me,"  said' Huntley. 

"Kneel,"  said  Joan.     "Now  take  my  hands.     Prepare  for 


ADOLESCENCE  371 

the  shock. ' '  And  she  leapt  lightly  to  his  knee  and  posed  for 
a  second,  poised  with  one  toe  on  Himtley's  thigh,  and  was 
down  again. 

"Do  it  again,  Joan,"  he  cried  with  enthusiasm.  "Do  it 
again." 

"Let  us  invent  dances,"  cried  Aunt  Phyllis.  "Let  us 
invent  dances.  Couldn't  we  dance  charades?" 

"Let  them  dance  as  nature  meant  them  to,"  said  Aunt 
Phoebe's  deepest  tones.  "Madly!" 

"Shall  we  try  that  Tango  we  did  the  other  night?"  said 
Hetty,  coming  behind  Peter. 

Peter  had  come  forward  to  the  group  in  the  centre  of  the 
room.  Old  habits  were  strong  in  him,  and  he  had  a  vague 
feeling  that  this  was  one  of  the  occasions  when  Joan  ought 
to  be  suppressed.  "We're  getting  chaotic,"  he  said. 

"You  see,  Peter,  I'm  Anarchy,"  said  Joan. 

"An  ordered  Freedom  is  the  best,"  said  Peter  without 
reflecting  on  his  words. 

"Nobby,  I  want  to  dance  with  you,"  said  Joan. 

"I've  never  danced  anything  but  a  Country  Dance — you 
know  the  sort  of  thing  in  which  people  stand  in  rows — in  my 
life, "  said  Oswald. 

"A  country  dance,"  cried  Joan.  "Sir  Koger  de  Cover- 
ley." 

"We  want  to  try  a  fox-trot  we  know,"  complained  one  of 
the  Branching  guests. 

Two  parties  became  more  and  more  distinctly  evident  in 
the  party.  There  was  a  party  which  centred  around  Hetty 
and  the  Sheldrick  girls,  which  was  all  for  the  rather  elabor- 
ately planned  freak  dances  they  had  more  or  less  learnt  in 
London,  the  Bunny-Hugs,  the  Fox-Trot,  and  various  Tangoes. 
Most  of  the  Londoners  were  of  this  opinion,  Sopwith  Greene 
trailed  Adela  with  him,  and  Iluntley  was  full  of  a  passionate 
desire  to  guide  Joan 's  feet  along  the  Tango  path.  But  Joan 's 
mind  by  a  kind  of  necessity  moved  contrariwise  to  Hetty's. 
Either,  she  argued,  they  must  dance  in  the  old  staid  ways — 
Oswald  and  the  Vicarage  girls  applauding — or  dance  as  the 
spirit  moved  them. 

"Oh,  dance  your  old  Fox-Trots,"  she  cried,  with  a  gesture 
that  seemed  to  motion  Huntley  and  Hetty  together.  "Have 


372  JOAN  AND  PETER 

your  music  all  rattle  and  rag-time  like  sick  people  groaning 
in  trains.  That's  neither  here  nor  there.  I  want  to  dance 
to  better  stuff  than  that.  Come  along,  Willy." 

She  seized  on  Wilmington's  arm. 

"But  where  are  you  going?"  cried  Iluntley. 

"I'm  going  to  dance  Chopin  in  the  hall — to  the  pianola." 

"You're  going  to  play,"  she  told  Wilmington. 

"But  you  can't,"  said  Peter. 

Joan  disappeared  with  her  slave.  A  light  seemed  to  go  out 
from  the  big  library  as  she  went.  "Now  we  can  get  on," 
said  Hetty,  laying  hands  on  her  Peter. 

For  a  time  the  Fox-Trot  ruled.  The  Vicarage  girls  didn  't 
do  these  things,  and  drifted  after  Joan.  So  did  Oswald. 
Towards  the  end  the  dancers  had  a  sense  of  a  cross-current  of 
sound  in  the  air,  of  some  adverse  influence  thrown  across  their 
gymnastics.  When  their  own  music  stopped,  they  became 
aware  of  that  crying  voice  above  the  thunder,  the  Revolu- 
tionary Etude. 

There  was  a  brief  listening  pause.  "Now,  how  the 
deuce,"  said  Iluntley,  "can  she  be  dancing  that?" 

He  led  the  way  to  the  hall.  .  .  . 

"I'm  tired  of  dancing,"  whispered  Hetty.  "Stay  back. 
They're  all  going.  I  want  you  to  kiss  the  little  corner  of 
my  niouf. " 

Peter  looked  round  quickly,  and  seized  his  privilege  with 
unseemly  haste.  "Let's  see  how  Joan  is  dancing  that  old 
row,"  he  said.  .  .  . 

Animation,  boldness,  and  strict  relegation  of  costume  to 
its  function  of  ornament  had  hitherto  made  Hetty  the  high 
light  of  this  little  gathering.  She  was  now  to  realize  how 
insecure  is  this  feminine  predominance  in  the  face  of  fresher 
youth  and  greater  boldness.  And  Joan  was  full  of  a  pretty 
girl's  discovery  that  she  may  do  all  that  she  dares  to  do. 
For  a  time — and  until  it  is  time  to  pay. 

Life  had  intoxicated  Joan  that  night.  A  derision  of  seem- 
liness  possessed  her.  She  was  full  of  impulse  and  power. 
She  felt  able  to  dominate  every  one.  At  one  time  or  other  she 
swept  nearly  every  man  there  except  Oswald  and  Peter  and 
Pryce  into  her  dancing.  Two  of  the  Braughing  youths  fell 
visibly  in  love  with  her,  and  Huntley  lost  his  head,  badgered 


ADOLESCENCE  373 

her  too  much  to  dance,  and  then  was  offended  and  sulked  in 
a  manner  manifest  to  the  meanest  capacity.  And  she  kissed 
Wilmington. 

That  was  her  wildest  impulse.  She  came  into  the  study 
where  he  was  playing  the  pianola  for  her  dancing.  She 
wanted  him  to  change  the  roll  for  the  first  part  of  the 
Kreutzer  Sonata,  and  found  herself  alone  with  him.  She 
loved  him  because  he  was  so  completely  and  modestly  hers. 
She  bent  over  him  to  take  off  the  roll  from  the  instrument, 
and  found  her  face  near  his  forehead.  "Dear  old  Willy," 
she  whispered,  and  put  her  hand  on  his  shoulder  and 
brushed  his  eyebrows  with  her  lips. 

Then  she  was  remorseful. 

"It  doesn't  mean  anything,  Willy,"  she  said. 

"I  know  it  doesn't,"  he  said  in  a  voice  of  the  deepest 
melancholy. 

"Only  you  are  a  dear  all  the  same,"  she  said.  "You  are 
clean.  You're  right." 

"If  it  wasn't  for  my  damned  Virtues "  said  Wilming- 
ton. "But  anyhow.  Thank  you,  Joan — very  much.  Shall 
I  play  you  this  right  through?" 

"A  little  slowly,"  she  said.  "It's  marked  too  fast,"  and 
went  towards  the  open  door. 

Then  she  flitted  back  to  him.  .  .  .  Her  intent  face  came 
close  to  his.  "I  don't  love  any  one,  Willy,"  she  said.  "I'm 
not  the  sort.  I  just  dance." 

They  looked  at  each  other. 

"I  love  you/'  said  Wilmington,  and  watched  her  go. 

But  she  had  made  him  ridiculously  happy.  .  .  . 

She  danced  through  the  whole  Kreut/er  Sonata.  The 
Kreutzer  Sonata  has  always  been  a  little  dirty  since  Tolstoy 
touched  it.  Tolstoy  pronounced  it  erotic.  There  are  men 
who  can  find  a  lascivious  import  in  a  Corinthian  capital. 
The  Kreutzer  Sonata  therefore  had  a  strong  appeal  to  Hunt- 
ley's  mind.  These  associations  made  it  seem  to  him  differ- 
ent from  other  music,  just  as  calling  this  or  that  substance 
a  "drug"  always  dignified  it  in  his  eyes  with  the  rich  sug- 
gestions of  vice.  He  read  strange  significances  into  Joan's 
choice  of  that  little  music  as  he  watched  her  over  the  heads 
of  the  Braughing  girls.  But  Joan  just  danced. 


374  JOAN  AND  PETER 

At  supper  she  found  herself  drifting-  to  a  seat  near  Peter. 
She  left  him  to  his  Hetty,  and  went  up  the  table  to  a  place 
under  Oswald 's  black  wing.  The  supper  at  Pel  ham  Ford  was 
none  of  your  stand-up  affairs.  Mrs.  Moxton's  ideas  of  a 
dance  supper  were  worthy  of  Britannia.  Oswald  carved  a 
big  turkey  and  Peter  had  cold  game  pie,  and  Aunt  Phyllis 
showed  a  delicate  generosity  with  a  sharp  carver  and  a  big 
ham.  There  were  hot  potatoes  and  various  salads,  and  jugs 
of  lemonade  and  claret  cup  for  every  one,  and  whisky  for 
the  mature.  Joan  became  a  sober  enquirer  about  African 
dancing. 

"It's  the  West  Coast  that  dances,"  said  Oswald. 
"There's  richer  music  on  the  "West  Coast  than  all  round  the 
Mediterranean." 

"All  this  American  music  comes  from  the  negro,"  he  de- 
clared. "There's  hardly  a  bit  of  American  music  that 
hasn  't  colour  in  its  blood. ' ' 

After  supper  Joan  was  the  queen  of  the  party.  Adela  was 
in  love  with  her  again,  as  slavish  as  in  their  schooldays,  and 
the  Sheldricks  and  the  Braughing  boys  and  girls  did  her 
bidding.  "Let's  do  something  processional,"  said  Joan. 
"Let  us  dress  up  and  do  the  Funeral  March  of  a  Marionette." 

Hetty  didn't  catch  on  to  that  idea,  and  Peter  was  some- 
how overlooked.  Most  of  the  others  scampered  off  to  get 
something  black  and  cast  aside  anything  too  coloured.  Aunt 
Phyllis  knew  of  some  black  gauze  and  produced  it.  There 
were  black  curtains  in  the  common  room,  and  these  were 
seized  upon  by  Iluntley  and  Wilmington.  They  made  a 
coffin  of  the  big  black  lacquered  post-box  in  the  hall,  and  a 
bier  of  four  alpenstocks  and  a  drying-board  from  the  scullery. 

Joan  was  chief  mourner,  and  after  the  Funeral  March 
was  over  danced  the  sorrows  of  life  before  the  bier  to  the 
first  part  of  the  Fifth  Symphony. 

Hetty  and  Peter  sat  close  together  and  yet  unusually  apart 
upon  the  broad  window-seat.  Hetty  looked  tired  and  Peter 
seemed  inattentive.  Perhaps  they  had  a  little  overdone  each 
other's  charm  that  Christmas. 

And  only  once  more  that  evening  did  it  happen  that  Peter 
and  Joan  met  face  to  face.  Nearly  everybody  poured  out 


ADOLESCENCE  375 

into  the  garden  to  see  the  guests  go  off.  The  Branching  peo- 
ple crowded  hilariously  into  a  car ;  the  others  walked.  The 
weather  had  suddenly  hardened,  a  clear  dry  cold  made  the 
paths  and  road  very  like  metal,  and  not  the  littlest  star  was 
missing  from  the  quivering  assembly  in  the  sky. 

"We'll  have  skating  yet,"  cried  the  Braughiug  party. 

Adela  and  Joan  and  Wilmington  and  Pryce  came  with 
Huntley  and  Greene  and  the  vicarage  girls  along  the  road  and 
over  the  ice-bound  water-splash  as  far  as  the  vicarage  gate. 
"Too  cooold  to  say  good-bye,"  cried  Joan.  "Oh,  my  poor 
bare  legs!"  and  led  a  race  back. 

Adela  was  left  far  behind,  but  neither  Wilmington  nor 
Pryce  would  let  Joan  win  without  a  struggle.  The  three 
shot  in  through  the  wide  front  door  almost  abreast,  and 
Joan  ran  straight  at  Peter  and  stopped  short  within  two 
feet  of  him. 

"  I  've  won ! ' '  said  Joan. 

Just  for  an  instant  the  two  looked  at  one  another,  and  it 
seemed  to  Joan  afterwards  that  she  had  seen  something 
then  in  Peter's  eyes,  something  involuntary  that  she  had 
caught  just  once  before  in  them — when  she  had  come  upon 
him  by  chance  in  Petty  Cury  when  first  she  had  gone  up 
to  Cambridge. 

A  silly  thing  to  think  about !  What  did  it  matter  ?  What 
did  anything  matter?  Life  was  a  dance,  and  Joan,  thank 
heaven !  could  dance.  Peter  was  just  nothing  at  all.  Noth- 
ing at  all.  Nothing  at  all. 

"I  wonder,  Joan,  how  many  miles  you  have  pranced  to- 
night!" said  Aunt  Phyllis,  kissing  her  good  night. 

"Joan,"  said  Adela,  "you  are  The  Loveliest."  .  .  . 

For  a  minute  or  so  Joan  stood  in  front  of  her  looking- 
glass,  studying  a  flushed,  candle-lit  figure.  .  .  . 

"Pah!"  she  said  at  last.  "Hetiy!"  and  flung  her  scanty- 
clothes  aside. 

She  caught  the  reflection  of  herself  in  the  mirror  again. 
She  spread  out  her  hands  in  a  gesture  to  the  pretty  shape 
she  saw  there,  and  stood. 

"What's  the  Good  of  it?"  she  said  at  last. 

As  soon  as  Joan's  head  touched  the  pillow  that  night  sho 


376  JOAN  AND  PETER 

fell  asleep,  and  she  slept  as  soundly  as  a  child  that  had  been 
thoroughly  naughty  and  all  at  sixes  and  sevens,  and  that 
has  been  well  slapped  and  had  a  good  cry  to  wind  up  with, 
and  put  to  bed.  In  all  the  world  there  is  no  sounder  sleep 
than  that. 


THE   WORLD   ON    THE   EVE   OF   WAR 

§    1 

OSWALD  sat  in  the  March  sunshine  that  filled  and 
warmed  his  little  suinmerhouse,  and  thought  about 
Joan  and  Peter.  .  .  . 

His  sudden  realization  of  Joan's  mental  maturity,  the 
clear  warning  it  brought  to  him  that  the  task  and  oppor- 
tunity of  education  was  passing  out  of  his  hands,  that  already 
the  reckoning  of  consequences  was  beginning  for  both  his 
wards,  set  his  mind  searching  up  and  down  amidst  the  mem- 
ories of  his  effort,  to  find  where  he  could  have  slipped,  where 
blundered  and  failed.  He  perceived  now  how  vague  had 
been  the  gesture  with  which  he  had  started,  when  he  pro- 
claimed his  intention  to  give  them  "the  best  education  in 
the  world." 

The  best  education  in  the  world  is  still  to  seek,  and  while 
he  had  been  getting  such  scraps  of  second  best  for  them 
as  he  could,  the  world  itself,  nature,  tradition,  custom, 
suggestion,  example  and  accident,  had  moulded  them  and 
made  them.  When  he  measured  what  had  been  done  upon 
these  youngsters  by  these  outward  things  and  compared  it 
with  their  deliberate  education,  the  schoolmaster  seemed  to 
him  to  be  still  no  more  than  a  half-hearted  dwarf  who  would 
snare  the  white  horses  of  a  cataract  with  a  noose  of  pack- 
thread. 

"The  generations  running  to  waste — like  rapids." 

But  there  are  stronger  harnessings  than  packthreads,  and 
there  are  already  engineers  in  the  world  who,  by  taking 
thought  and  patient  work,  can  tame  the  maddest  torrent 
that  ever  overawed  the  mind  of  man.  In  the  end  perhaps 
all  torrents  will  be  tamed,  and  knowledge  and  purpose  put 
an  end  to  aimless  adventure.  The  schoolmaster  will  not  al- 
ways be  a  dwarf.  .  .  . 

377 


378  JOAN  AND  PETER 

As  our  children  grow  beyond  our  control  we  begin  to 
learn  something  of  the  reality  of  education.  The  world  had 
Joan  and  Peter  now;  at  the  most  Oswald  could  run  and 
shout  advice  from  the  bank  as  they  went  down  the  rush. 
But  he  knew  that  he  could  have  done  more  for  them,  and 
that  with  a  different  world  he  could  have  done  inlinitely 
more  for  them  in  their  receptive  years.  They  were  the 
children  of  an  age;  their  restless  fever  of  impulse  was  but 
their  individual  share  in  a  great  fever.  The  whole  world 
now  was  restless,  out  of  touch  with  any  standards,  and 
manifestly  drifting  towards  great  changes. 

Neither  Joan  nor  Peter  seemed  to  have  any  Definite  pur- 
pose in  life.  Their  impulses  were  not  focused.  They  were 
drawn  hither  and  thither.  That  was  the  essential  failure  of 
their  adolescence.  Their  education  had  done  many  good 
things  for  them,  but  it  had  left  their  wills  as  spontaneous, 
indefinite  and  unsocial  as  the  will  of  a  criminal.  Physically 
Oswald  and  the  world  had  done  well  by  them;  they  were 
clean-blooded,  well  grown,  well  exercised  animals;  they  be- 
longed to  a  generation  of  youth  measurably  taller,  finer,  and 
more  beautiful  than  any  generation  before  them.  They 
were  swift-footed  and  nimble.  Mentally,  too,  they  were 
swift  and  clear.  It  was  not  that  their  ideas  were  confused 
but  their  wills.  Each  of  them  could  speak  and  read  aud 
write  three  languages  quite  well,  they  could  draw  well  and 
Peter  could  draw  brilliantly,  they  were  alive  to  art  and 
music,  they  read  widely,  they  had  the  dispassionate,  wide, 
scientific  vision  of  the  world.  But  being  so  fine  and  clean 
it  was  all  the  more  distressing  to  realize  that  these  two 
young  people  now  faced  the  world  with  no  clear  will  in  them 
about  it  or  themselves,  that  Joan  seemed  consumed  with 
discontents  and  this  dark  personal  quarrel  with  Peter,  arid 
that  Peter  could  be  caught  and  held  by  a  mere  sensual  ad- 
venture. Hetty  Reinhart  kept  him  busy  with  notes  and 
situations;  having  created  a  necessity  she  went  on  to  create 
a  jealous  rivalry.  He  would  be  sometimes  excited  and 
elated,  sometimes  manifestly  angry  and  sulky;  and  his  work 
at  Cambridge,  which  for  two  years  had  been  conspicuously 
brilliant,  was  falling  away. 

Until  Joan's  angry  outspokenness  had  forced  these  facts 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         379 

upon  his  attention,  Oswald  had  shirked  their  realization. 
He  had  seen  with  his  one  watchful  eye,  but  he  had  not  willed 
to  see.  A  score  of  facts  had  lain,  like  disagreeable  letters 
that  one  hesitates  to  answer,  uncorrelated  in  his  mind.  The 
disorders  of  the  Christmas  party  had  indeed  left  him  pro- 
foundly uneasy.  With  the  new  year  he  went  with  Peter 
on  a  trip  to  Russia.  He  wanted  the  youngster  to  develop  a 
vision  of  the  European  problem,  for  Peter  seemed  blind  to 
the  importance  of  international  things.  They  had  crossed 
to  Flushing,  travelled  straight  through  to  Berlin,  gone  about 
Berlin  for  a  few  days,  run  on  to  St.  Petersburg — it  was  not 
yet  Petrograd — visited  a  friendly  house  near  the  Valdai 
Hills,  spent  a  busy  week  in  and  about  Moscow,  and  returned 
by  way  of  Warsaw.  They  saw  Germany  already  trained  like 
an  athlete  for  the  adventure  of  the  coining  war,  and  Russia 
great  and  disorderly,  destined  to  be  taken  unawares.  Then 
they  returned  to  England  to  look  again  at  their  own  country 
with  eyes  refreshed  by  these  contrasts.  And  all  the  time 
Oswald  watched  Peter  and  speculated  about  the  thoughts  and 
ideas  hidden  in  Peter's  head. 

§  2 

This  Russian  trip  had  been  precipitated  by  a  sudden  op- 
portunity. Originally  Oswald  had  planned  a  Russian  tour 
for  his  wards  on  a  more  considerable  scale.  Among  the  un- 
solved difficulties  of  this  scheme  had  been  his  ignorance  of 
Russian.  He  had  thought  of  employing  a  courier — but  a 
courier  can  be  a  tiresome  encumbrance.  His  friend  Bailey, 
who  was  an  enthusiast  for  Russia  and  spoke  Russian  re- 
markably well  for  an  Englishman,  wrote  from  Petrograd 
offering  to  guide  Oswald  and  Peter  about  that  city,  sug- 
gesting a  visit  to  a  cousin  who  had  married  a  Russian  land- 
owner in  Novgorod,  and  a  week  or  so  in  Moscow,  where  some 
friends  of  Bailey's  would  keep  a  helpful  eye  on  the  travellers, 
it  was  too  good  a  chance  to  lose.  There  was  some  hasty 
buying  of  fur-lined  gloves,  insertion  of  wadding  under  the 
fur  of  Oswald's  fur  coat,  and  the  purchase  of  a  suitable  out- 
fit for  Peter. 

Bailey  had  his  misogynic  side,  Oswald  knew;  he  thought 


380  JOAN  AND  PETER 

women  troublesome  millinery  to  handle;  and  he  did  not  in- 
clude Joan  in  the  invitation.  On  the  whole  Oswald  did 
not  regret  that  omission,  because  it  gave  him  so  excellent  a 
chance  of  being  alone  with  Peter  for  long  spells,  and  getting 
near  his  private  thoughts. 

It  was  an  expedition  that  left  a  multitude  of  vivid  im- 
pressions upon  the  young  man's  memory;  the  still,  cold, 
starry  night  of  the  departure  from  Harwich,  the  lit  decks, 
the  black  waters,  the  foaming  wake  caught  by  the  ship's 
lights,  the  neat  Dutch  landscape  with  its  black  and  white 
cows  growing  visible  as  day  broke,  shivering  workers  under 
a  chill,  red-nosed  dawn  pouring  down  by  a  path  near  the 
railway  into  the  factories  of  some  industrial  town ;  the  long 
tiat  journey  across  Germany;  the  Sieges-Allee  and  the  war 
trophies  and  public  buildings  of  Berlin ;  the  Sunday  morn- 
ing crowd  upon  Unter  den  Linden ;  the  large  prosperity  of 
the  new  suburbs  of  Berlin ;  north  Germany  under  an  iron 
frost,  a  crowd  of  children  sliding  and  skating  near  Konigs- 
berg ;  the  dingier,  vaster  effects  of  Russia,  streets  in  Petro- 
grad  with  the  shops  all  black  and  gold  and  painted  with  shin- 
ing pictures  of  the  goods  on  sale  to  a  population  of  illiter- 
ates, the  night  crowd  in  the  People's  Palace;  a  sledge  drive 
of  ten  miles  along  the  ice  of  a  frozen  river,  a  wooden  coun- 
try house  behind  a  great  stone  portico,  and  a  merry  house 
party  that  went  scampering  out  after  supper  to  lie  on  the 
crisp  snow  and  see  the  stars  between  the  tree  boughs ;  the 
chanting  service  in  a  little  green-cupolaed  church  and  a 
pretty  village  schoolmistress  in  peasant  costume;  the  great 
red  walls  of  the  Kremlin  rising  above  the  Moskva  and  the 
first  glimpse  of  that  barbaric  caricature,  the  cathedral  of 
St.  Basil ;  the  painted  magnificence  of  the  Troitzkaya  mon- 
astery ;  a  dirty,  evil-smelling  little  tramp  with  his  bundle  and 
kettle,  worshipping  unabashed  in  the  Uspenski  cathedral; 
endless  bearded  priests,  Tartar  waiters  with  purple  sashes, 
a  whole  population  in  furs  and  so  looking  absurdly  wealthy 
to  an  English  eye;  a  thousand  such  pictures,  keen,  bright 
and  vivid  against  a  background  of  white  snow.  .  .  . 

The  romanticism  of  the  late  Victorians  still  prevailed  in 
Oswald's  mind.  The  picturesqueness  of  Russia  had  a  great 
effect  upon  him.  From  the  passport  office  at  Wirballen  with 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    381 

its  imposing  green-uniformed  guards  and  elaborate  cere- 
monies onward  into  Moscow,  he  marked  the  contrast  with 
the  trim  modernity  of  Germany.  The  wild  wintry  land- 
scape of  the  land  with  its  swamps  and  unkempt  thickets  of 
silver  birch,  the  crouching  timber  villages  with  their  cupo- 
laed  churches,  the  unmade  roads,  the  unfamiliar  lettering 
of  the  stations,  contributed  to  his  impression  of  barbaric 
greatness.  After  the  plainly  ugly,  middle-class  cathedral 
of  Berlin  he  rejoiced  at  the  dark  splendours,  the  green  ser- 
pentine and  incense,  of  St.  Isaac's;  he  compared  the  frozen 
Neva  to  a  greater  Thames  and  stood  upon  the  Troitzki  Bridge 
rejoicing  over  the  masses  of  the  fortress  of  St.  Peter  and 
St.  Paul.  In  Petrograd  he  said,  "away  from  here  to  the 
North  Pole  is  Russia  and  the  Outside,  the  famine-stricken 
north,  the  frozen  fen  and  wilderness,  the  limits  of  mankind/' 
Moscow  made  him  talk  of  the  mingling  of  east  and  west, 
western  and  eastern  costumes  jostled  in  the  streets.  He  was 
surprised  at  the  frequency  of  Chinamen.  "Away  from  here 
to  Vladivostok,"  he  said,  "is  Russia  and  all  Asia.  North, 
west,  east  and  south  there  is  limitless  land.  We  are  an 
island  people.  But  here  one  feels  the  land  masses  of  the 
earth." 

Peter  was  preoccupied  with  a  gallant  attempt  to  master 
colloquial  Russian  in  a  fortnight  by  means  of  a  Russian 
Self -Taught  he  had  bought  in  London;  he  did  not  thrust  his 
conversation  between  Bailey  and  Oswald,  but  sometimes  when 
he  was  alone  with  his  guardian  and  the  mood  took  him  he 
would  talk  freely  and  rather  well.  He  had  been  reading 
abundantly  and  variously :  it  was  evident  that  at  Cam- 
bridge he  belonged  to  a  talking  set.  If  he  had  no  directive 
form  in  his  mind  he  had  at  any  rate  something  like  a  sys- 
tematic philosophy. 

It  was  a  profoundly  sceptical  philosophy.  There  were 
moments  when  Oswald  was  reminded  of  Beresford's  "Hamp- 
denshire  Wonder,"  who  read  through  all  human  learning 
and  literature  before  the  age  of  five,  and  turned  upon  its 
instructor  with  "Is  this  all?"  Peter  looked  at  the  world 
into  which  he  had  come,  at  the  Kings  and  Kaisers  demanding 
devotion  to  "our  person,"  at  the  gentlemen  waving  flags 
and  talking  of  patriotism  and  service  to  empires  and  races 


382  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  "nationality,"  at  the  churches  and  priests  pursuing  their 
"policies,"  and  in  effect  he  turned  to  Oswald  with  the  same 
question.  In  the  background  of  his  imagination  it  was  only 
too  manifest  that  the  nymphs — with  a  general  family  re- 
semblance to  Hetty  Reiuhart — danced,  and  he  heard  that 
music  of  the  senses  which  the  decadent  young  men  of  the 
fin  de  siecle  period  were  wont  to  refer  to  as  "the  pipes  of 
Pan." 

He  and  Oswald  looked  together  at  Moscow  in  the  warm 
light  of  sunset.  They  were  in  the  veranda  of  a  hill-side 
restaurant  which  commanded  the  huge  bend  of  the  river  be- 
tween the  Borodinski  and  the  Kruimski  bridges.  The  city 
lay,  wide  and  massive,  along  the  line  of  the  sky,  with  little 
fields  and  a  small  church  or  so  in  the  foreground.  The  six 
glittering  domes  of  the  great  Church  of  the  Redeemer  rose 
in  the  centre  against  the  high  red  wall  and  the  clustering 
palaces  and  church  cupolas  of  the  Kremlin.  Left  and  right 
of  the  Kremlin  the  city  spread,  a  purple  sea  of  houses  and 
walls,  flecked  with  snowy  spaces  and  gemmed  with  red  reflect- 
ing windows,  through  which  the  river  twisted  like  a  silver  eel. 
Moscow  is  a  city  of  crosses,  every  church  has  its  bulbous 
painted  cupola  and  some  have  five  or  six,  and  every  cupola 
carries  its  brightly  gilded  two-armed  cross.  The  rays  of 
the  setting  sun  was  now  turning  all  these  crosses  to  pale  fire. 

Oswald,  in  spite  of  his  own  sceptical  opinions,  was  a  little 
under  the  spell  of  the  "Holy  Russia"  legend.  He  stood 
with  his  foot  on  a  chair  and  rested  his  jaw  on  his  hand, 
with  the  living  side  of  his  face  turned  as  usual  towards  his 
ward,  and  tried  to  express  the  confused  ideas  that  were 
stirring  in  his  mind.  "This  isn't  a  city  like  the  cities  of 
western  Europe,  Peter,"  he  said.  "This  is  something  dif- 
ferent. Those  western  cities,  they  grow  out  of  the  soil  on 
which  they  stand ;  they  are  there  for  ever  like  the  woods  and 
hills;  there  is  no  other  place  for  London  or  Rouen  or  Rome 
except  just  where  it  stands;  but  this,  Peter,  is  a  Tartar 
camp,  frozen.  It  might  have  been  at  Nijni-Novgorod  or 
Yaroslav  or  Kazan.  It  might  be  anywhere  upon  the  Russia 
plain;  only  it  happens  to  be  here.  It's  a  camp  changed  tc 
wood  and  brick  and  plaster.  That's  the  headquarters  camp 
there,  the  Tsar's  pavilions.  And  all  these  crosses  every- 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    883 

where  are  like  the  standards  outside  the  tents  of  the  cap- 
tains. ' ' 

"And  where  is  it  going?"  said  Peter,  looking  at  Moscow 
over  his  fur  collar,  with  his  hands  deep  in  his  overcoat 
pockets. 

"Asia  advancing  on  Europe — with  a  new  idea.  .  .  .  One 
understands  Dostoevsky  better  when  one  sees  this.  One  be- 
gins to  realize  this  Holy  Russia,  as  a  sort  of  epileptic  genius 
among  nations — like  his  Idiot,  insisting  on  moral  truth,  hold- 
ing up  the  cross  to  mankind." 

"What  truth?"  asked  Peter. 

"They  seem  to  have  the  Christian  idea.  In  a  way  we 
Westerns  don't.  Dostoevsky,  Tolstoy,  and  their  endless 
schools  of  dissent  have  a  character  in  common.  Christianity 
to  a  Russian  means  Brotherhood." 

"If  it  means  anything,"  said  Peter. 

The  youngster  reflected. 

"1  wonder,  is  there  really  this  Russian  idea?  I  don't  be- 
lieve very  much  in  these  national  ideas." 

"Say  national  character  then.  This  city  with  its  end- 
less crosses  is  so  in  harmony  with  Russian  music,  Russian 
art,  Russian  literature." 

"Any  city  that  had  to  be  built  here  would  have  to  look 
more  or  less  like  this,"  said  Peter. 

"  If  it  were  built  by  Americans  ? ' ' 

"If  they'd  lived  here  always,"  said  Peter.  "But  we're 
arguing  in  a  circle.  If  they'd  lived  here  always  the  things 
that  have  made  the  Russians  Russians,  would  have  made 
them  Russians.  I've  gone  too  far.  Of  course  there  is  a 
Russian  character.  They're  wanderers,  body  and  brain. 
Men  of  an  endless  land.  But " 

"Well?" 

"Not  much  of  a  Russian  idea  to  it.  ...  I  don't  beliere  a 
bit  in  all  these  crosses." 

"You  mean  as  symbols  of  an  idea?" 

"Yes.  Of  course  the  cross  has  meant  something  to  peo- 
ple. It  must  have  meant  tremendous  things  to  some  people. 
But  men  imitate.  One  sticks  up  a  cross  because  it  means  all 
sorts  of  deep  things  to  him.  Then  the  man  down  the  road 
thinks  he  will  have  a  cross  too.  And  the  man  up  the  road 


384  JOAN  AND  PETER 

doesn't  quite  see  what  it's  all  about  but  doesn't  like  to  be 
out  of  it.  So  they  go  on,  until  sticking  up  crosses  becomes 
a  habit.  It  becomes  a  necessity.  They'd  be  shocked  to  see 
a  new  church  without  four  or  five  crosses  on  it.  They  or- 
ganize a  business  in  golden  crosses.  Everybody  says,  'You 
must  have  a  cross.'  Long  ago  every  one  has  forgotten  that 
deep  meaning.  ..." 

"IFm,"  said  Oswald,  ''you  think  that?" 

"It's  just  a  crowd,"  said  Peter,  thinking  aloud.  "Under- 
neath the  crosses  it's  just  a  swarming  and  breeding  of  men. 
.  .  .  Like  any  other  men." 

' '  But  don 't  you  thmk  that  all  that  million  odd  down  there 
is  held  together  by  a  distinctive  idea  ?  Don 't  you  feel  some- 
times the  Russian  idea  about  you — like  the  smell  of  burnt 
wood  on  the  breeze?" 

"Well,  call  it  a  breeze,"  said  Peter.  "It's  like  a  breeze 
blowing  over  mud.  It  blows  now  and  then.  It's  forgotten 
before  it  is  past.  What  does  it  signify?" 

He  was  thinking  as  he  talked.  Oswald  did  not  want  to 
interrupt  him,  and  just  smiled  slightly  and  looked  at  Peter 
for  more. 

"I  don't  think  there's  any  great  essential  differences  be- 
tween cities,"  said  Peter.  "It's  easy  to  exaggerate  that. 
Mostly  the  differences  are  differences  of  scenery.  Beneath 
the  differences  it's  the  same  story  everywhere;  men  shoving 
about  and  eating  and  squabbling  and  multiplying.  We 
might  just  as  well  be  looking  at  London  from  Hampstead 
bridge  so  far  as  the  human  facts  go.  Here  things  are  done 
in  red  and  black  and  gold  against  a  background  of  white 
snow;  there  they  are  done  in  drab  and  grey  and  green. 
This  is  a  land  of  dull  tragedy  instead  of  dull  comedy,  gold 
crosses  on  green  onions  instead  of  church  spires,  extremes 
instead  of  means,  but  it's  all  the  same  old  human  thing. 
Even  the  King  and  Tsar  look  alike,  there's  a  state  church 
here,  dissenters,  landowners.  ..." 

"I  suppose  there  is  a  sort  of  parallelism,"  Oswald  con- 
ceded. .  .  . 

"We're  not  big  enough  yet  for  big  ideas,  the  Russian  idea, 
or  the  Christian  idea  or  any  such  idea, ' '  said  Peter.  ' '  Why 
pretend  we  have  them?" 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         385 

"Now  that's  just  it,"  said  Oswald,  coming  round  upon 
him  with  an  extended  finger.  "Because  we  want  them  so 
badly." 

' '  Does  every  one  ? ' ' 

"Yes.  Consciously  or  not.  That's  where  you  and  I  are 
at  issue,  Peter." 

"Oh,  I  don't  see  the  ideas  at  work!"  cried  Peter.  "Ex- 
cept as  a  sort  of  flourish  of  the  mind.  But  look  at  the 
everyday  life.  Wherever  we  have  been — in  London,  Paris, 
Italy,  Berlin,  here,  we  see  every  man  who  can  afford  it  mak- 
ing for  the  restaurants  and  going  where  there  are  women 
to  be  got.  Hunger,  indulgence,  and  sex,  sex,  sex,  sex.'' 
His  voice  was  suddenly  bitter.  He  turned  his  face  to  Oswald 

for  a  moment.  "We're  too  little.  These  blind  impulses 

I  suppose  there's  a  sort  of  impulse  to  Beauty  in  it.  Some 
day  perhaps  these  forces  will  do  something — drive  man  up 
the  scale  of  being.  But  as  far  as  we've  got !" 

He  stared  at  Moscow  again. 

He  seemed  to  have  done. 

"You  think  we're  oversexed?"  said  Oswald  after  a  pause. 

The  youngster  glanced  at  his  guardian. 

"I'm  not  blind,"  he  fenced. 

Then  he  laughed  with  a  refreshing  cheerfulness.  "It's 
youthful  pessimism.  Nobby.  My  mind  runs  like  this  be- 
cause it's  the  fashion.  We  get  so  dosed  with  Schopenhauer 
and  Nietzsche — usually  at  second  hand.  We  all  try  to  talk 
like  this.  Don't  mind  me." 

Oswald  smiled  back. 

"Peter,  you  drive  my  spirit  back  to  the  Victorians,"  he 
said.  "I  want  to  begin  quoting  Longfellow  to  you.  'Life 
is  real,  life  is  earnest ' 

"No!"  Peter  countered.     "But  it  ought  to  be." 

"'Well,  it  becomes  so.  We  have  Science,,  and  out  of  Sci- 
ence comes  a  light.  We  shall  see  the  Will  plainer  and 
plainer." 

"The  Will?"  said  Peter,  turning  it  over  in  his  mind. 

"Our  own  will  then,"  said  Oswald.  "Yours,  mine,  and 
every  right  sort  of  man's." 

Peter  seemed  to  consider  it. 

"It  won't  be  a  national  will,  anyhow,"  he  said,  coming 


386  JOAN  AND  PETER 

back  to  Moscow.  "It  won't  be  one  of  these  national  ideas. 
No  Holy  Russia — or  Old  England  for  the  matter  of  that. 
They're  just — human  accumulations.  No.  I  don't  know 
of  this  "Will  at  all — any  will,  Nobby.  I  can't  see  or  feel  this 
Will.  I  wish  1  could.  ..." 

He  had  said  his  say.  Oswald  turned  again  to  the  great 
spectacle  of  the  city.  Did  all  those  heavenward  crosses  now 
sinking  into  the  dusk  amount  to  no  more  than  a  glittering 
emanation  out  of  the  fen  of  life,  an  unmeaning  ignis  fatuus, 
born  of  a  morass  of  festering  desires  that  had  already  for- 
gotten it?  Or  were  these  crosses  indeed  an  appeal  and  a 
promise?  Out  of  these  millions  of  men  would  Man  at  last 
arise?  .  .  . 

Slowly,  smoothly,  unfalteringly,  the  brush  of  the  twilight 
had  been  sweeping  its  neutral  tint  across  the  spectacle,  paint- 
ing out  the  glittering  symbols  one  by  one.  A  chill  from  outer 
space  fell  down  through  the  thin  Russian  air,  a  dark  trans- 
parent curtain.  Oswald  shivered  in  his  wadded  coat. 
Abruptly  down  below,  hard  by  a  ghostly  white  church,  one 
lamp  and  then  another  pricked  the  deepening  blue.  A  little 
dark  tram-car  that  crept  towards  them  out  of  the  city  ways  to 
fetch  them  back  into  the  city,  suddenly  became  a  glow- 
worm. .  .  . 

§  3 

Twenty  years  before  Oswald  would  not  have  talked  in 
this  fashion  of  the  Will.  Twenty  years  before,  the  social  and 
political  order  of  the  world  had  seemed  so  stable  to  an  Eng- 
lish mind  that  the  thought  of  a  sustaining  will  was  super- 
fluous. Queen  Victoria  and  the  whole  system  had  an  air  of 
immortal  inertia.  The  scientific  and  economic  teachings 
under  which  Oswald's  ideas  had  been  shaped  recognized  no 
need  for  wilfully  co-ordinated  efforts.  The  end  of  educa- 
tion, they  indicated,  was  the  Diffusion  of  Knowledge.  Vic- 
torian thought  in  England  took  good  motives  for  granted, 
seemed  indeed  disposed  to  regard  almost  any  motive  as 
equally  good  for  the  common  weal.  Herbert  Spencer,  that 
philosopher  who  could  not  read  Kant,  most  typical  of  all 
English  intelligences  in  those  days,  taught  that  if  only 
there  were  no  regulation,  no  common  direction,  if  every  one 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         387 

were  to  pursue  his  own  individual  ends  unrestrained,  then 
by  a  sort  of  magic,  chaos,  freed  from  the  interference  of  any 
collective  direction,  would  produce  order.  His  supreme 
gift  to  a  generation  of  hasty  profiteers  was  the  discovery  that 
the  blind  scuffle  of  fate  could  be  called  "Evolution,"  and  so 
given  an  air  of  intention  altogether  superior  to  our  poor 
struggles  to  make  a  decent  order  out  of  a  greedy  scramble. 
For  some  decades,  whatever  sections  of  British  life  had 
ceased  to  leave  things  to  Providence  and  not  bother — not 
bother — were  leaving  them  to  Evolution — and  still  not  both- 
ering. .  .  . 

It  was  because  of  Oswald's  discovery  of  the  confused  and 
distressed  motives  of  Joan  and  Peter  and  under  the  sug- 
gestions of  the  more  kinetic  German  philosophy  that  was 
slowly  percolating  into  English  thought,  that  his  ideas  were 
now  changing  their  direction.  Formerly  he  had  thought  of 
nations  and  empires  as  if  they  were  things  in  themselves, 
loose  shapes  which  had  little  or  nothing  to  do  with  the  in- 
dividual lives  they  contained;  now  he  began  to  think  that  all 
human  organizations,  large  and  small  alike,  exist  for  an 
end ;  they  are  will  forms ;  they  present  a  purpose  that  claims 
the  subordination  of  individual  aims.  He  began  to  see  states 
and  nations  as  things  of  education,  beings  in  the  minds  of 
men. 

The  parallelism  of  Russia  and  Britain  which  Peter  had 
made,  struck  Oswald  as  singularly  acute.  They  had  a  closer 
parallelism  with  each  other  than  with  France  or  Italy  or  the 
United  States  or  Germany  or  any  of  the  great  political  sys- 
tems of  the  world.  Russia  was  Britain  on  land.  Britain 
was  Russia  in  an  island  and  upon  all  the  seas  of  the  globe. 
One  had  the  dreamy  lassitude  of  an  endless  land  horizon,  the 
other  the  hardbitten  practicality  of  the  salt  seas.  One  was 
deep-feeling,  gross,  and  massively  illiterate,  the  other  was 
pervaded  by  a  cockney  brightness.  But  each  was  trying 
to  express  and  hold  on  to  some  general  purpose  by  means 
of  forms  and  symbols  that  were  daily  becoming  more  con- 
spicuously inadequate.  And  each  appeared  to  be  moving  in- 
evitably towards  failure  and  confusion. 

One  afternoon  during  their  stay  in  Petrograd,  Bailey  took 
Oswald  and  Peter  to  see  a  session  of  the  Duma.  They  drove 


388  JOAN  AND  PETER 

in  a  sledge  down  the  Nevski  Prospekt  and  by  streets  of 
ploughed-up  and  tumbled  snow,  through  which  struggled 
an  interminable  multitude  of  sledges  bringing  firewood  into 
the  city,  to  the  old  palace  of  the  favourite  Potemkin,  into 
which  the  Duma  had  in  those  days  been  thrust.  The  Duma 
was  sitting  in  a  big  adapted  conservatory,  and  the  three 
visitors  watched  the  proceedings  from  a  little  low  gallery 
wherein  the  speakers  were  almost  inaudible.  Bailey  pointed 
out  the  large  proportion  of  priests  in  the  centre  and  ex- 
plained the  various  party  groups;  he  himself  was  very 
sympathetic  with  the  Cadets.  They  were  Anglo-maniac; 
they  idealized  the  British  constitution  and,  thought  of  a  lim- 
ited monarchy — in  the  land  of  extremes.  .  .  . 

Oswald  listened  to  Bailey's  exposition,  but  the  thing  that 
most  gripped  his  attention  was  the  huge  portrait  of  the  Tsar 
that  hung  over  the  gathering.  He  could  not  keep  his  eyes 
off  it.  There  the  figure  of  the  autocrat  stood,  with  its  side- 
long, unintelligent  visage,  four  times  as  large  as  life,  dressed 
up  in  military  guise  and  with  its  big  cavalry  boots  right 
over  the  head  of  the  president  of  the  Duma.  That  portrait 
was  as  obvious  an  insult,  as  outrageous  a  challenge  to  the 
self-respect  of  Russian  men,  as  a  gross  noise  or  a  foul  gesture 
would  have  been. 

"You  and  all  the  empire  exist  for  ME,"  said  that  foolish- 
faced  portrait,  with  its  busby  a  little  on  one  side  and  its  weak 
hand  on  its  sword  hilt.  .  .  . 

It  was  to  that  figure  they  asked  young  Russia  to  be  loyal. 

That  dull-faced  Tsar  and  the  golden  crosses  of  Moscow 
presented  themselves  as  Russia  to  the  young.  A  heavy- 
handed  and  very  corrupt  system  of  repression  sustained  their 
absurd  pretensions.  They  had  no  sanction  at  all  but  that 
they  existed — through  the  acquiescences  of  less  intelligent 
generations.  The  aged,  the  prosperous,  the  indolent,  the 
dishonest,  the  mean  and  the  dull  supported  them  in  a  vast 
tacit  conspiracy.  Beneath  such  symbols  could  a  land  under 
the  sting  of  modern  suggestions  ever  be  anything  but  a  will 
welter,  a  confusion  of  sentiments  and  instincts  and  wilful- 
ness?  "Was  it  so  wonderful  that  the  world  was  given  the 
stories  of  Artzibachev  as  pictures  of  the  will  forms  of  the 
Russian  young? 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         389 


§  4 

Through  all  that  journey  Oswald  was  constantly  comparing 
Peter  with  the  young  people  he  saw.  On  two  occasions  he 
and  Peter  went  to  the  Moscow  Art  Theatre.  Once  they  saw 
Hamlet  in  Russian,  and  once  Tchekhov's  Three  Sisters; 
and  each  was  produced  W7ith  a  completeness  of  ensemble,  an 
excellence  of  mechanism  and  a  dramatic  vigour  far  beyond 
the  range  of  any  London  theatre.  Here  in  untidy,  sprawl- 
ing, slushy  Moscow  shone  this  diamond  of  co-operative  effort 
and  efficient  organization.  It  set  Oswald  revising  certain 
hasty  generalizations  about  the  Russian  character.  .  .  . 

But  far  more  interesting  than  the  play  to  him  was  the 
audience.  They  were  mostly  young  people,  and  some  of 
them  were  very  young  people;  students  in  uniform,  bright- 
faced  girls,  clerks,  young  officers  and  soldiers,  a  sprinkling 
of  intelligent-looking  older  people  of  the  commercial  and 
professional  classes ;  each  evening  showed  a  similar  gather- 
ing, a  very  full  house,  intensely  critical  and  appreciative. 
It  was  rather  like  the  sort  of  gathering  one  might  see  in  the 
London  Fabian  Society,  but  there  were  scarcely  any  earnest 
spinsters  and  many  more  young  men.  The  Art  Theatre,  like 
a  magnet,  had  drawn  its  own  together  out  of  the  vast  bar- 
baric medley  of  western  and  Asiatic,  of  peasant,  merchant, 
priest,  official  and  professional,  that  thronged  the  Moscow 
streets.  And  they  seemed  very  delightful  young  people. 

His  one  eye  wandered  from  the  brightly-lit  stage  to  the 
rows  and  rows  of  faces  in  the  great  dim  auditorium  about 
him,  rested  on  Peter,  and  then  went  back  to  those  others. 
This,  then,  must  be  a  sample  of  the  Intelligentzia.  These 
were  the  youth  who  figured  in  so  large  a  proportion  of  recent 
Russian  literature.  How  many  bright  keen  faces  were  there ! 
What  lay  before  them?  .  .  . 

A  dark  premonition  crept  into  his  mind  of  the  tragedy  of 
all  this  eager  life,  growing  up  in  the  clutch  of  a  gigantic 
political  system  that  now  staggered  to  its  end.  .  .  . 

This  youth  he  saw  here  was  wonderfully  like  the  new  gen- 
eration that  was  now  dancing  its  way  into  his  house  at  Pel- 
ham  Ford. 


390  JOAN  AND  PETER 

It  was  curious  to  note  how  much  more  this  big  dim  house- 
ful of  young  Muscovites  was  like  a  British  or  an  American 
audience  than  it  was  to  a  German  gathering.  Perhaps  there 
were  rather  more  dark  types,  perhaps  more  high  cheekbones ; 
it  was  hard  to  say.  .  .  . 

But  all  the  other  north  temperate  races,  it  seemed  to  Os- 
wald, as  distinguished  from  the  Germans,  had  the  same  sug- 
gestion about  them  of  unco-ordinated  initiatives.  Their 
minds  moved  freely  in  a  great  old  system  that  had  lost  its 
hold  upon  them.  But  the  German  youths  were  co-ordinated. 
They  were  tremendously  co-ordinated.  Two  Sundays  ago  he 
and  Peter  had  been  watching  the  Sunday  morning  parade 
along  Unter  den  Linden.  They  had  gone  to  see  the  white- 
trousered  guards  kicking  their  legs  out  ridiculously  in  the 
goose  step  outside  the  Guard  House  that  stands  opposite  the 
Kaiser's  Palace,  they  had  walked  along  Unter  den  Linden 
to  the  Brandenburger  Tor,  and  then,  after  inspecting  that 
vainglorious  trophy  of  piled  cannon  outside  the  Reichstag, 
turned  down  the  Sieges  AJlee,  and  so  came  back  to  the  Adlon 
by  way  of  the  Leipziger  Platz.  Peter  had  been  alive  to  many 
things,  but  Oswald's  attention  had  been  concentrated  almost 
exclusively  on  the  youngsters  they  were  passing,  for  the  most 
part  plump,  pink-faced  students  in  corps  caps,  very  erect 
in  their  bearing  and  very  tight  in  their  clothes.  They  were 
an  absolutely  distinct  variety  of  the  young  human  male. 
A  puerile  militarism  possessed  them  all.  They  exchanged 
salutations  with  the  utmost  punctilio.  "While  England  had 
been  taking  her  children  from  the  hands  of  God,  and  not 
so  much  making  them  as  letting  them  develop  into  notes  of 
interrogation,  Germany  without  halt  or  hesitation  had 
moulded  her  gift  of  youth  into  stiff,  obedient,  fresh  soldiers. 

There  had  been  a  moment  like  a  thunderclap  while  Oswald 
and  Peter  had  been  near  the  Brandenburger  Tor.  A  swift 
wave  of  expectation  had  swept  through  the  crowd ;  there  had 
been  a  galloping  of  mounted  policemen,  a  hustling  of  traffic 
to  the  side  of  the  road,  a  hasty  lining  up  of  spectators.  Then 
with  melodious  tootlings  and  amidst  guttural  plaudits,  a  big 
white  automobile  carrying  a  glitter  of  uniforms  had  gone  by, 
driven  at  a  headlong  pace.  "Per  Kaiser!"  Just  for  a  mo- 
ment the  magnificence  hung  in  the  eye — and  passed. 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         391 

What  had  they  seen?  Cloaks,  helmets,  hard  visages,  one 
distinctive  pallid  face;  something  melodramatic,  something 
eager  and  in  a  great  hurry,  something  that  went  by  like 
the  sound  of  a  trumpet,  a  figure  of  vast  enterprise  in  shining 
armour,  with  mailed  list.  This  was  the  symbol  upon  which 
these  young  Germans  were  being  concentrated.  This  was 
the  ideal  that  had  gripped  them.  Something  very  modern 
and  yet  romantic,  something  stupendously  resolute.  Going 
whither?  At  any  rate,  going  magnificently  somewhere. 
That  was  the  power  of  it.  It  was  going  somewhere.  For 
good  or  bad  it  was  an  infinitely  more  attractive  lead  than 
the  cowardly  and  oppressive  Tsardom  that  was  failing  to  hold 
the  refractory  minds  of  these  young  Russians,  or  the  current 
edition  of  the  British  imperial  ideal,  twangling  its  idiotic 
banjo  and  exhorting  Peter  and  his  generation  to  "tax  the 
foreigner"  as  a  worthy  end  and  aim  in  life. 

Oswald,  with  his  eye  on  the  dim,  preoccupied  audience 
about  him,  recalled  a  talk  that  he  and  Peter  had  had  with  a 
young  fellow-traveller  in  the  train  between  Hanover  and 
Berlin.  It  had  been  a  very  typical  young  German,  glasses 
and  all;  and  his  clothes  looked  twice  as  hard  as  Peter's,  and 
he  sat  up  stiffly  while  Peter  slouched  on  the  seat.  He  evi- 
dently wanted  to  air  his  English,  while  Peter  had  not  the 
remotest  desire  to  air  his  German,  and  only  betrayed  a  knowl- 
edge of  German  when  it  was  necessary  to  explain  some  Eng- 
lish phrase  the  German  didn't  quite  grasp.  The  German 
wanted  to  know  whether  Oswald  and  Peter  had  been  in  Ger- 
many before,  where  they  were  going,  what  they  thought  of 
it,  what  they  were  going  to  think  of  Berlin. 

Responding  to  counter  questions  he  said  he  had  been 
twice  to  England.  He  thought  England  was  a  great  coun- 
try. ' '  Yes — but  not  systematic.  No ! " 

"You  mean  undisciplined?" 

Yes,  it  was  perhaps  undisciplined  he  meant. 

Oswald  said  that  as  a  foreigner  he  was  most  struck  by 
the  tremendous  air  of  order  in  north  Germany.  The  Ger- 
mans were  orderly  by  nature.  The  admission  proved  an  at- 
tractive gambit. 

The  young  German  questioned  Oswald's  view  that  the  Ger- 
mans were  naturally  orderly.  Hard  necessity  had  made 


392  JOAN  AND  PETER 

them  so.  They  had  had  to  discipline  themselves,  they  had 
been  obliged  to  develop  a  Kultur — encircled  by  enemies. 
Now  their  Kultur  was  becoming  a  second  nature.  Every 
nation,  he  supposed,  brought  its  present  to  mankind.  Ger- 
many's was  Order,  System,  the  lesson  of  Obedience  that 
would  constantly  make  her  more  powerful.  The  Germans 
were  perforce  a  thorough  people.  Thorough  in  all  they 
did.  Although  they  had  come  late  into  modern  industrial- 
ism they  had  already  developed  social  and  economic  organiza- 
tion far  beyond  that  of  any  other  people.  Nicht  wahr? 
Their  work  was  becoming  necessary  to  the  rest  of  mankind. 
In  Russia,  for  example,  in  Turkey,  in  Italy,  in  South  America, 
it  was  more  and  more  the  German  who  organized,  developed, 
led.  "Though  we  are  fenced  round,"  he  said,  "still — we 
break  out." 

There  was  something  familiar  and  yet  novel  in  all  this 
to  Oswald.  It  was  like  his  first  sensation  upon  reading 
Shakespeare  in  German.  It  was  something  very  familiar — 
in  an  unfamiliar  idiom.  Then  he  recognized  it.  This  was 
exactly  his  own  Imperialism — Teutonized.  The  same  as- 
sertion of  an  educational  mission.  .  .  . 

"Everywhere  we  go,"  said  the  young  German,  "our  su- 
perior science,  our  higher  education,  our  better  method  pre- 
vails. Even  in  your  India ' 

He  smiled  and  left  that  sentence  unfinished. 

"But  your  militarism,  your  sabre  rule  here  at  home;  this 
Zabern  business;  isn't  that  a  little  incompatible  with  this  idea 
of  Germany  as  a  great  civilizing  influence  permeating  the 
world?" 

"Not  at  all,"  said  the  young  German,  with  the  readiness 
of  a  word-perfect  actor.  "Behind  our  missionaries  of  order 
we  must  have  ready  the  good  German  sword." 

"But  isn't  the  argument  of  force  apt  to  be  a  little — decivil- 
izing?" 

The  young  German  did  not  think  so.  "When  I  was  in 
England  I  said,  there  are  three  things  that  these  English 
do  not  properly  understand  to  use,  they  are  the  map  or  index, 
the  school,  and — the  sword.  Those  three  things  are  the  tri- 
angle of  German  life.  ..." 

That   hung   most   in   Oswald's  mind.     He   had   gone   on 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OP  WAR    393 

talking  to  the  young  German  for  a  long  time  about  the  dif- 
ferences of  the  British  and  the  German  way.  He  had  made 
Peter  and  the  youngster  compare  their  school  and  college 
work,  and  what  was  far  more  striking,  the  difference  in 
pressure  between  the  two  systems.  "You  press  too  hard," 
he  said.  ''In  Alsace  you  have  pressed  too  hard — in  Posen. " 

"Perhaps  we  sometimes  press — I  do  not  know,"  said  the 
young  German.  "It  is  the  strength  of  our  determination. 
We  are  impatient.  We  are  a  young  people."  For  a  time 
Oswald  had  talked  of  the  methods  of  Germany  in  the  Camer- 
oons  and  of  Britain  on  the  Gold  Coast,  where  the  German 
hsd  been  growing  cacao  by  the  plantation  system,  turning 
the  natives  into  slaves,  while  the  British,  with  an  older  ex- 
perience and  a  longer  view,  had  left  the  land  in  native 
hands  and  built  up  a  happy  and  loyal  free  cultivation  ten 
times  as  productive  mile  for  mile  as  the  German.  It  seemed 
to  him  to  be  one  good  instance  of  his  general  conception  of 
Germany  as  the  land  of  undue  urgency.  "Your  Wissmann 
in  East  Africa  was  a  great  man — but  everywhere  else  you 
drive  too  violently.  You  antagonize."  North  Germany 
everywhere,  he  said,  had  the  same  effect  upon  him  of  a  coun- 
try "going  hard." 

"Germany  may  be  in  too  much  of  a  hurry,"  he  repeated. 

"We  came  into  world-politics  late,"  said  the  young  Ger- 
man, endorsing  Oswald's  idea  from  his  own  point  of  view. 
"We  have  much  to  overtake  yet."  .  .  . 

The  Germans  had  come  into  world-politics  late.  That 
was  very  true.  They  were  naive  yet.  They  could  still  feed 
their  natural  egotism  on  the  story  of  a  world  mission.  The 
same  enthusiasms  that  had  taken  Russia  to  the  Pacific — and 
to  Grand  Ducal  land  speculation  in  Manchuria — and  the 
English  to  the  coolie  slavery  of  the  Rand,  was  taking  these 
Germans  now — whither?  Oswald  did  not  ask  what  route 
to  disillusionment  Germany  might  choose.  But  he  believed 
that  she  would  come  to  disillusionment.  She  was  only  a  lit- 
tle later  in  phase  than  her  neighbours ;  that  was  all.  In  the 
end  they  would  see  that  that  white-cloaked  heroic  figiire  in 
the  automobile  led  them  to  futility  as  surely  as  the  skulking 
Tsar.  Not  that  way  must  the  nations  go.  .  .  . 

Oswald  saw  no  premonition  of  a  world  catastrophe  in  this 


394  JOAN  AND  PETER 

German  youngster's  devotion  to  an  ideal  of  militant  aggres- 
sion, nor  in  the  whole  broad  spectacle  of  straining  prepara- 
tion across  which  he  and  Peter  travelled  that  winter  from 
Aix  to  Wirballen.  He  was  as  it  were  magically  blind.  He 
could  stand  on  the  Hanover  platform  and  mark  the  largeness 
of  the  station,  the  broad  spreading  tracks,  the  endless  sid- 
ings, the  tremendous  transport  preparations,  that  could  have 
no  significance  in  the  world  but  military  intention,  and  still 
have  no  more  to  say  than,  "These  Germans  give  themselves 
elbow-room  on  their  railways,  Peter.  I  suppose  land  is 
cheaper."  He  could  see  nothing  of  the  finger  of  fate  point- 
ing straight  out  of  all  this  large  tidy  preparedness  at  Peter 
and  their  fellow-passengers  and  all  the  youth  of  the  world. 
lie  thought  imperialistic  monarchy  was  an  old  dead  thing 
in  Russia  and  in  Britain  and  in  Germany  alike. 

In  Berlin  indeed  in  every  photographer 's  was  the  touched- 
np  visage  of  the  Kaiser,  looking  heroic,  and  endless  post- 
cards of  him  and  of  his  sons  and  of  the  Kaiserin  and 
little  imperial  grandchildren  and  the  like;  they  were  as 
dull  and  dreary-looking  as  any  royalties  can  be,  and  it 
was  inconceivable  to  Oswald  that  such  figures  could  really 
rule  the  imagination  of  a  great  people.  lie  did  not  realize 
that  all  the  tragedy  in  the  world  might  lie  behind  the 
words  of  that  young  German,  "we  came  into  world-politics 
late,"  behind  the  fact  that  the  German  imperialist  system 
was  just  a  little  less  decayed,  a  little  less  humorous,  a  little 
less  indolent  and  disillusioned  than  either  of  its  great  paral- 
lels to  the  east  and  west.  He  did  not  reflect  that  no  system 
is  harmless  until  its  hands  are  taken  off  the  levers  of  power. 
He  could  still  believe  that  he  lived  in  an  immensely  stable 
world,  and  that  these  vast  forms  of  kingdom  and  empire,  with 
their  sham  reverences  and  unmeaning  ceremonies  and  obli- 
gations, their  flags  and  militancy  and  their  imaginative 
senility,  threatened  nothing  beyond  the  negative  evil  of  un- 
inspired lives  running  to  individual  waste.  That  was  the 
thing  that  concerned  him.  He  saw  no  collective  fate  hang- 
ing over  all  these  intent  young  faces  in  the  Moscow  Art 
Theatre,  as  over  the  strutting  innocents  of  patriotic  Berlin; 
he  had  as  yet  no  intimation  of  the  gigantic  disaster  that  was 
now  so  close  at  hand,  that  was  to  torment  and  shatter  the 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         395 

whole  youth  of  the  world,  that  was  to  harvest  the  hope  and 
energy  of  these  bright  swathes  of  life.  .  .  . 

He  glanced  at  Peter,  intent  upon  the  stage. 

Peter  lay  open  to  every  impulse.  That  was  Oswald's 
supreme  grievance  then  against  Tsars,  Kings,  and  Churches. 
They  had  not  been  good  enough  for  Peter.  That  seemed 
grievance  enough. 

He  did  not  imagine  yet  that  they  could  murder  the  likes 
of  Peter  by  the  hundred  thousand,  without  a  tremor. 

He  loved  the  fine  lines  of  the  boy's  profile,  he  marked 
his  delicate  healthy  complexion.  Peter  was  like  some  won- 
derful new  instrument  in  perfect  condition.  And  all  these 
other  youngsters,  too,  had  something  of  the  same  clean  fire 
in  them.  .  .  . 

Was  it  all  to  be  spent  upon  love-making  and  pleasure-seek- 
ing and  play?  Was  this  exquisite  hope  and  desire  presently 
to  be  thrown  aside,  rusted  by  base  uses,  corroded  by  self- 
indulgence,  bent  or  broken?  "The  generations  running  to 
waste — like  rapids.  ..." 

He  still  thought  in  that  phrase.  The  Niagara  of  Death  so 
near  to  them  all  now  to  which  these  rapids  were  heading,  he 
still  did  not  hear,  did  not  suspect  its  nearness.  .  .  . 

And  Joan .  From  Peter  his  thoughts  drifted  to  Joan. 

Joan  apparently  could  find  nothing  better  to  do  in  life  than 
dance.  .  .  . 

Suddenly  Peter  took  a  deep  breath,  sat  back,  and  began 
to  clap.  The  whole  house  broke  out  into  a  pelting  storm  of 
approval. 

"Ripping!"  said  Peter.     "Oh!  ripping." 

He  turned  his  bright  face  to  Oswald.  "They  do  it  so 
well,"  he  said,  smiling.  "I  had  forgotten  it  was  in  Russian. 
I  seemed  to  understand  every  word." 

Oswald  turned  his  eye  again  to  Hamlet  in  Gordon 
Craig's  fantastic  setting — which  Moscow  in  her  artistic  pro- 
fusion could  produce  when  London  was  too  poor  to  do  so. 

§  5 

Very  similar  were  the  thoughts  in  Oswald's  mind  three 
months  later,  three  months  nearer  the  world  catastrophe,  as 


396 

he  sat  in  his  summerhouse  after  Joan  had  told  him  of  her 
quarrel  with  Peter. 

Her  denunciation  of  Peter  had  had  the  curious  effect  upon 
him  of  making  him  very  anxious  about  her.  So  far  as  Peter 
went,  what  she  had  told  him  had  but  confirmed  and  made 
definite  what  he  had  known  by  instinct  since  the  Christmas 
party.  His  mind  was  used  now  to  the  idea  of  Peter  being 
vicious.  But  he  was  very  much  shocked  indeed  at  the  dis- 
covery that  Joan  was  aware  of  Peter's  vices.  That  was  a 
new  jolt  to  his  mind.  In  many  things  Joan  and  Peter  had 
changed  his  ideas  enormously,  but  so  far  he  had  retained  not 
only  his  wardroom  standards  with  regard  to  the  morals  of  a 
youth,  but  also  his  romantic  ideals  of  feminine  purity  with 
regard  to  a  girl.  He  still  thought  of  his  own  womenkind  as 
of  something  innocent,  immaculate  and  untouchable,  beings 
in  a  different  world  from  the  girls  who  "didn't  mind  a  bit 
of  fun"  and  the  women  one  made  love  to  boldly. 

But  now  he  had  to  face  the  fact — Joan  had  forced  it  upon 
him — this  new  feminine  generation  wasn't  divided  in  that 
obvious  way.  The  clean  had  knowledge,  the  bold  were  not 
outcast  and  apart.  The  new  world  of  women  was  as  mixed  as 
the  world  of  men.  He  sat  in  his  summerhouse  thinking  of 
his  Joan's  flushed  face,  her  indignant  eyes,  her  outspoken 
words. 

"It  was  a  woman's  face,"  he  whispered.  .  .  . 

And  he  was  realizing  too  how  much  more  urgent  the  end- 
ing of  adolescence  was  becoming  with  a  girl  than  it  could 
ever  be  with  a  boy.  Peter  might  tumble  into  a  scrape  or  so 
and  scramble  out  again,  not  very  much  the  worse  for  it,  as 
he  himself  had  done.  But  Joan,  with  all  the  temerity  of 
a  youth,  might  be  making  experiments  that  were  fatal.  He 
had  not  been  watching  her  as  he  had  watched  Peter.  Sud- 
denly he  woke  up  to  this  realization  of  some  decisive  issue 
at  hand.  Why  was  she  so  whitely  angry  with  Peter  ?  Why 
did  she  complain  of  having  to  "stand  too  much"  from  Peter? 
Her  abuse  of  his  friends  had  the  effect  of  a  counter  attack. 
Was  there  some  mischief  afoot  from  which  Peter  restrained 
her  ?  What  men  were  there  about  in  Joan 's  world  ? 

There  was  something  slimy  and  watchful  about  this  fellow 
Huntley.  Could  there  be  more  in  that  affair  than  one  liked 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    397 

to  think?  ...  Or  was  there  some  one  unknown  in  London 
or  in  Cambridge? 

She  and  Peter  were  quarrelling  about  the  Easter  party. 
It  would  apparently  be  impossible  to  have  any  Easter  party 
this  year,  since  both  wanted  to  bar  out  the  other  one's  friends. 
And  anyhow  there  mustn't  be  any  more  of  this  Hetty 
Reinhart  business  at  Felham  Ford.  That  must  stop.  It 
ought  never  to  have  happened.  ...  He  would  take  Peter 
over  to  Dublin.  They  could  accept  an  invitation  he  had  had 
from  Graham  Powys  out  beyond  Foxrock,  and  they  could 
motor  into  Dublin  and  about  the  country,  and  perhaps  the 
Irish  situation  might  touch  the  boy's  imagination.  .  .  . 

Joan  could  go  to  her  aunts  at  The  Ingle-Nook.  .  .  . 

Should  he  have  a  talk  to  Aunt  Phyllis  about  the  girl? 

It  was  a  pity  that  Aunt  Phyllis  always  lost  her  breath 
and  was  shaken  like  an  aspen  leaf  with  fine  feeling  whenever 
one  came  to  any  serious  discussion  with  her.  If  it  wasn't 
for  that  confounded  shimmer  in  her  nerves  and  feelings,  she 
would  be  a  very  wise  and  helpful  woman.  .  .  . 


§  6 

Oswald's  thoughts  ranged  far  and  wide  that  morning. 

Now  he  would  be  thinking  in  the  most  general  terms  of 
life  as  he  conceived  it,  now  he  would  be  thinking  with  vivid 
intensity  about  some  word  or  phrase  or  gesture  of  Joan 
and  Peter. 

He  was  blind  still  to  the  thing  that  was  now  so  close  to 
all  his  world ;  nevertheless  a  vague  uneasiness  about  the 
trend  of  events  was  creeping  into  his  mind  and  mixing  with 
his  personal  solicitudes.  Many  men  felt  that  same  uneasi- 
ness in  those  feverish  days — as  if  Death  cast  his  shadow  upon 
them  before  he  came  visibly  into  their  lives. 

Oswald  belonged  to  that  minority  of  Englishmen  who  think 
systematically,  whose  ideas  join  on.  Most  Englishmen,  even 
those  who  belong  to  what  we  call  the  educated  classes,  still 
do  not  think  systematically  at  all ;  you  cannot  understand 
England  until  you  master  that  fact ;  their  ideas  are  in 
slovenly  detached  little  heaps,  they  think  in  ready-made 


398  JOAN  AND  PETER 

phrases,  they  are  honestly  capable  therefore  of  the  most  gro- 
tesque inconsistencies.  But  Oswald  had  built  up  a  sort  of 
philosophy  for  himself,  by  which  he  did  try  his  problems 
and  with  which  he  fitted  in  such  new  ideas  as  came  to  him. 
It  was  a  very  distinctive  view  of  life  he  had ;  a  number  of  in- 
fluences that  are  quite  outside  the  general  knowledge  of  Eng- 
lish people  had  been  very  powerful  in  shaping  it.  Biological 
science,  for  example,  played  a  quite  disproportionate  part  in 
it.  Like  the  countrymen  of  Metchnikoff,  most  of  the  coun- 
trymen of  Darwin  and  Huxley  believe  firmly  that  biological 
science  was  invented  by  the  devil  and  the  Germans  to 
undermine  the  Established  Church.  But  Oswald  had  been 
exceptional  in  the  chances  that  had  turned  his  attention  to 
these  studies.  And  a  writer  whose  suggestions  had  played 
a  large  part  in  shaping  his  ideas  about  education  and  social 
and  political  matters  was  J.  J.  Atkinson.  He  thought  At- 
kinson the  most  neglected  of  all  those  fine-minded  English- 
men England  ignores.  He  thought  Lang  and  Atkinson's 
Social  Origins  one  of  the  most  illuminating  books  he  had 
ever  read  since  Winwood  Reade's  Martyrdom  of  Man. 
No  doubt  it  will  be  amusing  to  many  English  readers  that 
Oswald  should  have  mixed  up  theories  of  the  origins  and 
destinies  of  mankind  with  his  political  views  and  his  anx- 
ieties about  Joan's  behaviour  and  Peter's  dissipations  but 
he  did.  It  was  the  way  of  his  mind.  He  perceived  a  con- 
nexion between  these  things. 

The  view  he  had  developed  of  human  nature  and  human 
conditions  was  saturated  with  the  idea  of  the  ancestral  ape. 
In  his  instincts,  he  thought,  man  was  still  largely  the  crea- 
ture of  the  early  Stone  Age,  when,  following  Atkinson,  he 
supposed  that  the  human  herd,  sex  linked,  squatted  close 
under  the  dominion  of  its  Old  Man,  and  hated  every  stranger. 
He  did  not  at  all  accept  the  Aristotelian  maxim  that  man 
is  "a  political  animal."  He  was  much  more  inclined  to 
Schopenhauer's  comparison  of  human  society  to  a  collection 
of  hedgehogs  driven  together  for  the  sake  of  warmth.  He 
thought  of  man  as  a  being  compelled  by  circumstances  of  his 
own  inadvertent  creation  to  be  a  political  animal  in  spite  of 
the  intense  passions  and  egotisms  of  his  nature.  Man  he 
judged  to  be  a  reluctant  political  animal.  Man's  prehensile 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         399 

hand  has  given  him  great  possibilities  of  experiment,  he  is 
a  restless  and  curious  being,  knowledge  increases  in  him  and 
brings  power  with  it.  So  he  jostles  against  his  fellows.  He 
becomes  too  powerful  for  his  instincts.  The  killing  of  man 
becomes  constantly  more  easy  for  man.  The  species  must 
needs  therefore  become  political  and  religious,  tempering 
its  intense  lusts  and  greeds  and  hostilities,  if  it  is  to  save 
itself  from  self-destruction.  The  individual  man  resists  the 
process  by  force  and  subterfuge  and  passivity  at  every  step. 
Nevertheless  necessity  still  finds  something  in  the  nature  of 
this  fiercest  of  its  creatures  to  work  upon.  In  the  face  of 
adult  resistance  necessity  harks  back  to  plastic  immaturity. 
Against  the  narrow  and  intense  desires  of  the  adult  man, 
against  the  secretive  cunning  and  dispersiveness  of  our  ape 
heredity,  struggle  the  youthful  instincts  of  association.  In- 
dividualism is  after  all  a  by-path  in  the  history  of  life. 
Every  mammal  begins  by  being  dependent  and  social;  even 
the  tiger  comes  out  of  a  litter.  The  litter  is  brotherhood. 
Every  mother  is  a  collectivist  for  her  brood.  A  herd,  a 
tribe,  a  nation,  is  only  a  family  that  has  delayed  dispersal, 
stage  by  stage,  in  the  face  of  dangers.  All  our  education  is  a 
prolongation  and  elaboration  of  family  association,  forced 
upon  us  by  the  continually  growing  danger  of  the  con- 
tinually growing  destructiveness  of  our  kind. 

And  necessity  has  laid  hold  of  every  device  and  formula 
that  will  impose  self-restraint  and  devotion  upon  the  lonely 
savagery  of  man,  that  will  help  man  to  escape  race-suicide. 
In  spite  of  ever  more  deadly  and  far-reaching  weapons,  man 
still  escapes  destruction  by  man.  Religion,  loyalty,  patriot- 
ism, those  strange  and  wonderfully  interwoven  nets  of  super- 
stition, fear,  flattery,  high  reason  and  love,  have  subjugated 
this  struggling  egotistical  ape  into  larger  and  larger  masses 
of  co-operation,  achieved  enormous  temporary  securities. 
But  the  ape  is  still  there,  struggling  subtly.  Deep  in  every 
human  individual  is  a  fierce  scepticism  of  and  resentment 
against  the  laws  that  bind  him,  and  the  weaker  newer  in- 
stincts that  would  make  him  the  servant  of  his  fellow  man. 

Such  was  Oswald's  conception  of  humanity.  It  marched 
with  all  his  experiences  of  Africa,  where  he  had  struggled 
to  weave  the  net  of  law  and  teaching  against  warrior,  slave- 


400  JOAN  AND  PETER 

trader,  disease  and  greed.     It  marched  now  with  all  the  ap- 
pearances of  the  time.     So  it  was  he  saw  men. 

It  seemed  to  him  that  the  world  that  lay  behind  the  mask  of 
his  soft,  sweet  Hertfordshire  valley,  this  modern  world  into 
which  Joan  and  Peter  had  just  rushed  off  so  passionately, 
was  a  world  in  which  the  old  nets  of  rule  and  convention 
which  had  maintained  a  sufficiency  of  peace  and  order  in 
Europe  for  many  generations  of  civilization,  were  giving 
way  under  the  heavy  stresses  of  a  new  time.  Peoples  were 
being  brought  too  closely  together,  too  great  a  volume  of  sug- 
gestions poured  into  their  minds,  criticism  was  vivid  and  de- 
structive; the  forms  and  rules  that  had  sufficed  in  a  less 
crowded  time  were  now  insufficient  to  hold  imaginations  and 
shape  lives.  Oswald  could  see  no  hope  as  yet  of  a  new  net 
that  would  sweep  together  all  that  was  bursting  out  of  the 
old.  His  own  generation  of  the  'eighties  and  'nineties,  un- 
der a  far  less  feverish  urgency,  had  made  its  attempt  to 
patch  new  and  more  satisfactory  network  into  the  rotting 
reticulum,  but  for  the  most  part  their  patches  had  done  no 
more  than  afford  a  leverage  for  tearing.  He  had  built  his 
cosmogony  upon  Darwin  and  Winwood  Reade,  his  religion 
upon  Cotter  Morrison's  Service  of  Man;  he  had  inter- 
woven with  that  a  conception  of  the  Empire  as  a  great 
civilizing  service.  That  much  had  served  him  through  the 
trying  years  at  the  end  of  adolescence,  had  in  spite  of  strong 
coarse  passions  made  his  life  on  the  whole  a  useful  life. 
King,  church,  and  all  the  forms  of  the  old  order  he  had  been 
willing  to  accept  as  a  picturesque  and  harmless  parapher- 
nalia upon  these  structural  ideas  to  which  he  clung.  He 
had  been  quite  uncritical  of  the  schoolmaster.  Now  with 
these  studies  of  education  that  Joan  and  Peter  had  forced 
upon  him,  he  was  beginning  to  realize  how  encumbering  and 
obstructive  the  old  paraphernalia  could  be,  how  it  let  in  in- 
dolence, stupidity,  dishonesty,  and  treachery  to  the  making 
of  any  modern  system.  A  world  whose  schools  are  unre- 
formod  is  an  unreformed  world.  Only  in  the  last  year  or  so 
had  he  begun  to  accept  the  fact  that  for  some  reason  these 
dominant  ideas  of  his,  this  humanitarian  religion  which  had 
served  his  purpose  and  held  his  life  and  the  lives  of  a  gen- 
eration of  liberal-minded  Englishmen  together,  had  no  grip- 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    401 

ping  power  upon  his  wards.  This  failure  perplexed  him  pro- 
foundly. Had  his  Victorian  teachers  woven  prematurely,  or 
had  they  used  too  much  of  the  old  material?  Had  they 
rather  too  manifestly  tried  to  make  the  best  of  two  worlds — 
leaving  the  schools  alone?  Must  this  breaking  down  of 
strands  that  was  everywhere  apparent,  go  still  further?  And 
if  so,  how  far  would  the  breaking  down  have  to  go  before 
fresh  nets  could  be  woven? 

If  Oswald  in  his  summerhouse  in  the  spring  of  1914  could 
see  no  immediate  catastrophe  ahead,  he  could  at  least  see 
that  a  vast  disintegrative  process  had  begun  in  the  body  of 
European  civilization.  This  disintegration,  he  told  himself, 
was  a  thing  to  go  on  by  stages,  to  be  replaced  by  stages; 
it  would  give  place  to  a  new  order,  a  better  order,  "some- 
day"; everything  just  and  good  was  going  to  happen  some- 
day, the  liberation  of  India,  the  contentment  of  Ireland,  eco- 
nomic justice,  political  and  military  efficiency.  It  was  all 
coming — always  coming  and  never  arriving,  that  new  and 
better  state  of  affairs.  What  did  go  on  meanwhile  was  dis- 
integration. The  British  mind  hates  crisis;  it  abhors  the 
word  "Now."  It  believes  that  you  can  cool  water  for  ever 
and  that  it  will  never  freeze,  that  you  can  saw  at  a  tree  for 
ever  and  that  it  will  never  fall,  that  there  is  always  some 
sand  left  above  in  the  hour-glass.  When  the  English  Belshaz- 
zar  sees  the  writing  on  the  wall,  he  welcomes  the  appearance 
of  a  new  if  rather  sensational  form  of  publication,  and  he 
sits  back  to  enjoy  it  at  his  leisure.  .  .  . 

The  nets  were  breaking,  but  they  would  never  snap.  That 
in  effect  was  Oswald's  idea  in  1913.  The  bother,  from  his 
point  of  view,  was  that  they  had  let  out  Joan  and  Peter  to  fu- 
tility. 

There  is  a  risk  that  the  catastrophic  events  of  1914  may 
blind  the  historian  to  the  significance  of  the  spinning  straws 
of  1913.  But  throughout  Europe  the  sands  were  trickling 
before  the  avalanche  fell.  The  arson  of  the  suffragettes,  the 
bellicose  antics  of  the  Unionist  leaders  in  Ulster,  General 
Gough's  Curragh  mutiny,  were  all  parts  of  the  same  re- 
laxation of  bonds  that  launched  the  grey-clad  hosts  of  Ger- 
many into  Belgium.  Only  the  habits  of  an  immense  securitj 
could  have  blinded  Oswald  to  the  scale  and  imminence  of  the 


402  JOAN  AND  PETER 

disaster.  The  world  had  outgrown  its  ideas  and  its  will. 
Already  people  are  beginning  to  forget  the  queer  fevers 
that  ran  through  the  British  community  in  1913.  For  exam- 
ple there  was  the  violent  unrest  of  the  women.  That  may 
exercise  the  historian  in  the  future  profoundly.  Probably 
he  will  question  the  facts.  Right  up  to  the  very  outbreak 
of  the  war  there  was  not  a  week  passed  without  some  new 
ridiculous  outrage  on  the  part  of  the  militant  suffragettes. 
Now  it  was  a  fine  old  church  would  be  burnt,  now  a  well- 
known  country  house ;  now  the  mania  would  take  the  form  of 
destroying  the  letters  in  pillar-boxes,  now  the  attack  was 
upon  the  greens  of  the  golf  links.  Public  meetings  ceased 
to  be  public  meetings  because  of  the  endless  interruptions  by- 
shrill  voices  crying  "Votes  for  women!"  One  great  tri- 
umph of  the  insurgents  was  a  raid  with  little  hammers  upon 
the  west-end  shop-windows.  They  burnt  the  tea  pavilion  in 
Kew  Gardens,  set  fire  to  unoccupied  new  buildings,  inau- 
gurated a  campaign  of  picture-slashing  at  the  public  ex- 
hibitions. For  a  time  they  did  much  mischief  to  the  cush- 
ions and  fittings  of  railway  carriages.  Churches  had  to  be 
locked  up  and  museums  closed  on  account  of  them.  Poor 
little  Pelham  Ford  church  had  had  to  buy  a  new  lock  against 
the  dangers  of  some  wandering  feminist.  And  so  on  and 
so  on.  But  this  revolt  of  the  women  was  more  than  a  politi- 
cal revolt.  That  concentration  upon  the  Vote  was  the  con- 
centration of  a  vast  confused  insurgence  of  energy  that  could 
as  yet  find  no  other  acceptable  means  of  expression.  New 
conditions  had  robbed  whole  strata  of  women  of  any  eco- 
nomic importance,  new  knowledge  had  enormously  dimin- 
ished the  need  for  their  domestic  services,  the  birth-rate  had 
fallen,  the  marriage  age  had  risen,  but  the  heedless  world 
had  made  no  provision  for  the  vitality  thus  let  loose.  The 
old  ideals  of  a  womanly  life  showed  absurd  in  the  light  of 
the  new  conditions.  Why  be  pretty  and  submissive  when 
nobody  wants  you  ?  Why  be  faithful  with  no  one  to  be  faith- 
ful to?  Why  be  devoted  in  a  world  which  has  neither 
enousrh  babies  nor  lovers  nor  even  its  old  proportion  of  help- 
less invalids  to  go  round?  Why,  indeed,  to  come  to  the  very 
heart  of  the  old  ideal,  keep  chaste  when  there  is  no  one  to 
keep  chaste  for?  Half  the  intelligent  women  in  that  world 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         403 

had  stood  as  Joan  had  done,  facing  their  own  life  and  beauty 
and  asking  desperately  "What  is  the  Good  of  it?" 

But  while  the  old  nets  rotted  visibly,  there  were  no  new 
nets  being  woven.  There  was  everywhere  the  vague  expecta- 
tion of  new  nets,  of  a  new  comprehensiveness,  a  new  way  of 
life,  but  there  was  no  broad  movement  towards  any  new  way 
of  life.  Everywhere  the  old  traditions  and  standards  and 
institutions  remained,  discredited  indeed  and  scoffed  at,  but 
in  possession  of  life.  Energetic  women  were  reaching  out  in 
a  mood  of  the  wildest  experiment  towards  they  knew  not 
what.  It  was  a  time  of  chaotic  trials.  The  disposition  of 
the  first  generation  of  released  women  had  been  towards  an 
austere  sexlessness,  a  denial  of  every  feminine  weakness, 
mental  and  physical,  and  so  by  way  of  Highmorton  and 
hockey  to  a  spinsterish,  bitter  competition  with  men.  A  few 
still  bolder  spirits,  and  Aunt  Phoebe  Stubland  was  among 
these  pioneers,  carried  the  destructive  "Why  not?"  still 
further.  Grant  Allen's  Woman  Who  Did  and  Arthur's  in- 
fidelities were  but  early  aspects  of  a  wide  wave  of  philopro- 
genitive and  eugenic  sentimentality.  The  new  generation 
carried  "why  not?"  into  the  sphere  of  conduct  with  amazing 
effect. 

Women  are  the  custodians  of  manners,  and  mothers  and 
hostesses  who  did  not  dream  of  the  parallelism  of  their 
impulse  with  militancy,  were  releasing  the  young  to  an  un- 
heard-of extravagance  of  dress  and  festival.  Joan  could 
wear  clothes  at  a  Chelsea  dance  that  would  have  shocked  a 
chorus  girl  half  a  century  before;  she  went  about  London 
in  the  small  hours  with  any  casual  male  acquaintance;  so 
far  as  appearances  went  she  might  have  been  the  most  dis- 
reputable of  women.  She  yielded  presently  to  Huntley's 
persistence  and  began  dancing  the  tango  with  him.  It  was 
the  thing  to  slip  away  from  a  dance  in  slippers  and  a  wrap, 
and  spend  an  hour  or  so  careering  about  London  in  a  taxi  or 
wandering  on  Hampstead  Heath.  Joan's  escapades  fretted 
the  sleeping  tramps  upon  the  Thames  Embankment.  Lon- 
don, which  had  hitherto  dispersed  its  gatherings  about  eleven 
and  got  to  bed  as  a  rule  by  midnight,  was  aspiring  in  those 
days  to  become  nocturnal.  The  restaurants  were  obliged  to 
shut  early,  but  a  club  was  beyond  such  regulations.  Neces- 


404  JOAN  AND  PETER 

sity  created  the  night  club,  which  awoke  about  eleven  and 
closed  again  after  a  yawning  breakfast  of  devilled  bones. 

A  number  of  night  clubs  were  coming  into  existence,  to 
the  particular  delight  of  young  Winterbaurn.  His  boyish 
ambition  for  Joan  was  returning.  He  had  seen  her  dance 
and  heard  her  dancing  praised.  Vulgar  people  made  wild 
vulgar  guesses  in  his  hearing  at  what  lay  behind  her  grave 
and  sometimes  sombre  prettiness.  He  pretended  to  be  very 
discreet  about  that.  It  became  the  pride  of  his  life  to  ap- 
pear at  some  crowded  night  club  in  possession  of  Joan;  he 
did  not  know  what  people  thought  of  her  or  of  him  but  he 
hoped  for  the  worst.  He  wore  the  most  beautiful  buttons  on 
his  white  waistcoat  and  the  most  delicate  gold  chain  you  can 
imagine.  In  the  cloakroom  he  left  a  wonderful  overcoat  and 
a  wonderful  cane.  Sometimes  he  encouraged  the  ringlets 
in  his  hair  and  felt  like  Disraeli,  and  sometimes  he  restrained 
them  and  felt  like  a  cold,  cynical  Englishman  of  the  darker 
sort.  He  would  sit  swelling  with  pride  beside  Joan,  and 
nod  to  painted  women  and  heavy  men;  he  knew  no  end  of 
people.  He  did  not  care  what  sort  of  people  they  were  so 
long  as  he  knew  them.  It  was  always  his  ambition  to  be  seen 
drinking  champagne  with  Joan.  Joan  had  no  objection  in 
the  world,  but  she  could  not  bring  herself  to  swallow  a  drink 
that  tasted,  she  thought,  like  weak  vinegar  mixed  with  a 
packet  of  pins  and  that  went  up  your  nose  and  made  your 
brain  swing  slowly  to  and  fro  on  its  axis  for  the  rest  of  the 
evening.  So  she  just  drank  nothing  at  all. 

She  would  sit  at  her  table  with  her  pretty  bare  arms  folded 
under  her  like  the  paws  of  a  little  cat,  with  her  face,  that 
still  had  the  delicacy  and  freshness  of  a  child's,  as  intent  as 
any  intelligent  child's  can  be  on  the  jumble  of  people  before 
her,  and  her  sombre  eyes,  calm  and  beautiful,  looking  at 
smart  London  trying  at  last  to  take  its  pleasures  gaily. 
Perhaps  some  fortunate  middle-aged  gentleman  of  Winter- 
baum's  circle  would  be  attempting  to  charm  her  by  brilliant 
conversation,  as,  for  instance  Sir  Joseph  Lystrom,  with  a  full- 
mouthed  German  flavour  in  his  voice,  in  this  style:  "Pretty 
cheap  here  this  evening  somehow,  eh?  What?"  Some- 
where in  the  back  of  Sir  Joseph 's  mind  was  the  illusion  that 
by  barking  in  this  way  and  standing  treat  profusely,  lay 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         405 

the  road  to  a  girl's  young  love.  Somewhen  perhaps — who 
knows? — he  may  have  found  justification  for  that  belief. 
Joan  had  long  since  learnt  how  to  turn  a  profile  to  these 
formal  attentions,  and  appear  to  be  interested  without  hear- 
ing or  answering  a  word. 

Or  sometimes  it  would  be  Huntley.  Huntley  had  lately 
taken  to  dodging  among  the  night  clubs  to  which  he  had 
access,  when  Joan  was  in  London.  Usually  such  nights 
ended  in  futility,  but  occasionally  he  was  lucky  and  found 
Joan.  Then  he  would  come  and  talk  and  suggest  ideas  to 
her.  He  still  remained  the  most  interesting  personality  in 
her  circle.  She  pretended  to  Winterbaum  and  herself  to  be 
bored  by  his  pursuit,  but  indeed  she  looked  for  it.  Except 
for  Winterbaum  and  Huntley  and  Winterbaum 's  transitory 
introductions,  she  remained  a  detached  figure  in  these  places. 
Sometimes  quite  good-looking  strangers  sat  a  little  way  off 
and  sought  to  convey  to  her  by  suitable  facial  expression  the 
growth  of  a  passionate  interest  in  her.  She  conveyed  to  them 
in  return  that  they  were  totally  invisible  to  her,  resisting  at 
times  a  macabre  disposition  to  take  sights  at  them  suddenly 
and  amazingly  or  put  out  her  tongue.  Sometimes  women 
of  the  great  Winterbaum  circle  would  make  a  fuss  of  her. 
They  called  her  a  "dear  child."  They  would  have  been 
amazed  at  the  complete  theoretical  knowledge  a  dear  child 
of  unrestricted  reading  could  possess  of  them  and  their 
little  ways. 

"So  this  is  the  life  of  pleasure,"  thought  the  dear  child. 
"Wettf" 

And  then  that  same  question  that  Peter  seemed  always  to 
be  asking  of  Oswald:  "Is  this  all?" 

When  she  danced  in  these  places  she  danced  with  a  sort 
of  contempt.  And  the  sage,  experienced  men  who  looked  at 
her  so  knowingly  never  realized  how  much  they  imagined 
about  her  and  how  little  they  knew. 

She  would  sit  and  think  how  indecent  it  was  to  be  at  the 
same  time  old  and  dissipated.  Some  of  these  women  here, 
she  perceived,  were  older  than  her  aunts  Phoebe  and  Phyllis, 
years  older.  Their  faces  were  painted  and  done  most  amaz- 
ingly— Joan  knew  all  about  facial  massage  and  the  rest  of  it 
— and  still  they  were  old  faces.  But  their  poor  bodies  were 


406  JOAN  AND  PETER 

not  nearly  so  old  as  their  faces,  that  was  the  tragedy  of  them. 
Joan  regarded  the  tremendous  V  decolletage  of  a  lively 
grandmother  before  her,  and  the  skin  of  the  back  shone  as 
young  as  her  own.  The  good  lady  was  slapping  the  young 
gentleman  next  to  her  with  a  quite  smooth  and  shapely  arm. 
Joan  speculated  whether  the  old  fashion  of  the  masked  ball 
and  the  Venetian  custom  of  masks  which  she  had  been  read- 
ing about  that  day  in  Voltaire's  Princesse  de  Babylone, 
might  not  have  something  to  do  with  that.  But — she  re- 
verted— only  young  people  ought  to  make  love  at  all.  Her 
aunts  didn't;  Oswald  didn't.  And  Oswald  was  years 
younger  than  some  of  the  men  here,  and  in  Joan's  eyes  at 
least  far  more  presentable.  He  had  a  scarred  face  indeed 
but  a  clean  skin;  some  of  the  old  men  here  had  skins  one 
would  shiver  to  touch,  and  the  expressions  of  evil  gargoyles. 
She  let  her  thoughts  dwell — not  for  the  first  time — on  Oswald 
and  a  queer  charm  he  had  for  her.  Never  in  all  her  life 
had  she  known  him  do  or  say  a  mean,  dishonest,  unjust,  or 
unkind  thing.  In  some  ways  he  was  oddly  like  Peter,  but 
wise  and  gentle — and  not  exasperating.  .  .  . 

But  all  this  playing  with  love  in  London  was  detestable, 
all  of  it.  This  was  really  a  shameful  place.  It  was  shame- 
ful to  be  here.  Love — mixed  up  with  evening  dress  and 
costly  clothes  and  jewellery  and  nasty  laughter  and  cigars, 
strong  cigars  and  drink  that  slopped  about.  It  was  disgust- 
ing. These  people  made  love  after  their  luncheons  and  din- 
ners and  suppers.  Pigs!  They  were  all  pigs.  They  looked 
like  pigs.  If  ever  she  made  love  it  should  be  in  the  open 
air,  in  some  lovely  place  with  blue  mountains  in  the  distance, 
where  there  were  endless  wild  flowers,  where  one  could  swim. 
No  man  she  had  ever  talked  with  of  love  had  really  under- 
stood anything  of  the  beauty  of  love  and  the  cleanness  of 
love — except  Mir  Jelaluddin.  And  he  had  a  high-pitched 
voice  and  a  staccato  accent — and  somehow.  .  .  .  One  ought 
not  to  be  prejudiced  against  a  dark  race,  but  somehow  it  was 
unthinkable.  .  .  . 

Joan  sat  in  the  night  club  dreaming  of  a  lover,  and  the 
men  about  her  glanced  furtively  at  her  face,  asking  them- 
selves, "Can  it  be  I?"  men  with  red  ears,  men  with  greasy 
hair,  men  with  unpleasing  necks  and  clumsy  gestures;  bald 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         407 

men,  fat  men,  watery-eyed  men,  cheats,  profiteers,  usurers, 
snobs,  toadies,  successful  old  men  of  every  sort  and  young 
men  who  had  done  nothing:  and  for  the  most  part  never 
would.  "Can  it  be  I?"  they  surmised  dimly,  seeing  her 
pensive  eyes.  And  she  was  dreaming  of  a  lithe,  white,  slen- 
der figure,  strong  and  clean.  He  would  hunt  among  the 
mountains,  he  would  swim  swift  rivers;  he  would  never  drink 
strong  drink  nor  reek  of  smoke.  .  .  . 

At  this  moment  young  Winterbaum  became  urgent  with 
his  beautiful  gold  cigarette  case.  Joan  took  a  cigarette  and 
lighted  it,  and  sat  smoking  with  her  elbows  side  by  side  on 
the  table. 

' '  You  're  not  bored  ? ' '  said  young  Winterbaum. 

"Oh,  no.     I'm  watching  people.     I  don't  want  to  talk." 

"Oh  !  not  at  all  ?"  said  young  Winterbaum. 

"So  long  as  one  has  to  talk,"  he  said  after  reflection  and 
with  an  air  of  cleverness,  "one  isn't  really  friends." 

"Exactly,"  said  Joan,  and  blew  smoke  through  her  nose. 

What  was  it  she  had  been  thinking  about?  She  could  not 
remember,  the  thread  was  broken.  She  was  sorry.  She  had 
a  vague  memory  of  something  pleasant.  .  .  .  She  fell  into 
a  fresh  meditation  upon  Jews.  All  Jews,  she  thought, 
ought  to  grow  beards.  At  least  after  they  were  thirty. 
They  are  too  dark  to  shave,  and  besides  there  is  a  sort  of  in- 
dignity about  their  beaked  shaven  faces.  A  bearded  old  Jew 
can  look  noble,  a  moustached  old  Jew  always  looked  like  an 
imitation  of  a  Norman  gentleman  done  in  cheaper  material. 
But  that  of  course  was  exactly  what  he  was.  .  .  . 

Why  did  men  of  forty  or  fifty  always  want  to  dance  with 
and  make  love  to  flappers?  Some  of  these  girls  here  must 
be  two  or  three  years  younger  than  herself.  What  was  the 
interest?  They  couldn't  talk;  they  weren't  beautiful;  one 
could  see  they  weren't  beautiful.  And  they  laughed,  good 
God !  how  they  laughed !  Girls  ought  to  be  taught  to  laugh, 
or  at  any  rate  taught  not  to  laugh  offensively.  Laughter 
ought  to  be  a  joyful,  contagious  thing,  jolly  and  kind,  but 
these  shrieks !  How  few  of  these  people  looked  capable  of 
real  laughter!  They  just  made  this  loud  chittering  sound. 
Only  human  beings  laugh.  .  .  . 

In  this  manner  the  mind  of  Joan  was  running  on  the 


408  JOAN  AND  PETER 

evening  when  she  saw  Peter  and  Hetty  come  into  the  club 
which  tried  to  live  up  to  the  name  of  "The  Nest  of  the  Burn- 
ing PlKEnix."  Some  tango  experts  had  just  relinquished 
the  floor  and  there  was  a  space  amidst  the  throng  when 
Hetty  made  her  entry.  Hetty  had  made  a  great  effort,  she 
was  in  full  London  plumage,  and  her  effect  was  tremendous. 

About  her  little  bold  face  was  a  radiant  scheme  of  pea- 
cock's feathers,  her  slender  neck  carried  a  disc  a  yard  and  a 
quarter  wide;  her  slender,  tall  body  was  sheathed  in  black 
and  peacock  satin;  she  wore  enormous  earrings  and  a  great 
barbaric  chain.  Her  arms  were  bare  except  for  a  score  of 
bangles,  and  she  had  bare  sandalled  feet.  She  carried  her 
arrow  point  of  a  chin  triumphantly.  Peter  was  not  her  only 
attendant.  There  was  also  another  man  in  her  train  whom 
every  one  seemed  to  recognize,  a  big,  square-faced,  hand- 
some man  of  thirty -five  or  so  who  made  Peter  look  very  young 
and  flimsy.  "She's  got  Fred  Beevor!"  said  Winterbaum 
with  respect,  and  dropped  the  word  "Million."  Peter's  ex- 
pression was  stony,  but  Joan  judged  he  was  not  enjoying 
himself. 

There  were  very  few  unoccupied  chairs  and  tables,  but 
opposite  Joan  were  two  gilt  seats  and  another  disengaged  at 
a  table  near  at  hand.  Hetty  was  too  busy  with  her  triumph 
to  note  Joan  until  Beevor  had  already  chosen  this  place. 
With  a  slight  awkwardness  the  two  parties  mingled.  Young 
Winterbaum  at  least  was  elated.  Beevor  after  a  few  civili- 
ties to  Joan  let  it  appear  that  Hetty  preoccupied  him.  Peter 
was  evidently  not  enjoying  himself  at  all.  Joan  found  him 
seated  beside  her  and  silent. 

Joan  knew  that  it  is  the  feminine  role  to  lead  conversation, 
but  it  seemed  to  her  rather  fun  to  have  to  encourage  a  tongue- 
tied  Peter.  A  malicious  idea  came  into  her  head. 

"Well,  Petah,"  she  said;  "why  don't  you  say  I  oughtn't 
to  be  here?" 

Peter  regarded  her  ambiguously.     He  had  an  impulse. 

"No  decent  people  ought  to  be  here,"  he  said  quietly. 
"Let's  go  home,  Joan." 

Her  heart  jumped  at  the  suggestion.  All  her  being  said 
yes.  And  then  she  remembered  that  she  had  as  much  right 
to  have  a  good  time  as  Peter.  If  she  went  back  with  him  it 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    409 

would  be  like  giving  in  to  him ;  it  would  be  like  admitting  his 
right  to  order  her  about.  And  besides  there  was  Hetty.  He 
wasn't  really  disgusted.  All  he  wanted  to  do  really  was  to 
show  off  because  he  was  jealous  of  Hetty.  He  didn't  want 
to  go  home  with  Joan.  She  wasn't  going  to  be  a  foil  for 
Hetty  anyhow.  And  finally,  once  somewhere  he  had  refused 
her  almost  exactly  the  same  request.  She  checked  herself 
and  considered  gravely.  A  little  touch  of  spite  crept  into 
her  expression. 

"No,"  she  said  slowly.  "No.  ...  I've  only  just  come, 
Petah." 

"Very  well,"  said  Peter.  "/  don't  mind.  If  you  like 
this  sort  of  thing ' ' 

He  said  no  more,  sulking  visibly. 

Joan  resolved  to  dance  at  the  first  opportunity,  and  to 
dance  in  a  bold  and  reckless  way — so  as  thoroughly  to  exas- 
perate Peter.  She  looked  about  the  room  through  the  smoke- 
laden  atmosphere  in  the  hope  of  seeing  Huntley.  .  .  . 

She  and  Peter  sat  side  by  side,  feeling  very  old  and  ex- 
perienced and  worldly  and  up-to-date.  But  indeed  they 
were  still  only  two  children  who  ought  to  have  been  packed 
off  to  bed  hours  before. 

§  7 

The  disorder  in  the  world  of  women,  the  dissolution  of 
manners  and  restraints,  was  but  the  more  intimate  aspect  of 
a  universal  drift  towards  lawlessness.  The  world  of  labour 
was  seething  also  with  the  same  spirit  of  almost  aimless 
insurrection.  In  a  world  of  quickened  apprehensions  and 
increasing  stimulus  women  were  losing  faith  in  the  rules  of 
conduct  that  had  sufficed  in  a  less  exacting  age.  Far  pro- 
founder  and  more  dangerous  to  the  established  order  were  the 
scepticisms  of  the  workers.  The  pretensions  of  the  old  social 
system  that  trade  unionism  had  scarcely  challenged  were 
now  being  subjected  throughout  all  western  Europe  to  a 
pitiless  scrutiny  by  a  new  and  more  educated  type  of  em- 
ploye. 

The  old  British  trade  unionism  had  never  sought  much 
more  than  increased  wages  and  a  slightly  higher  standard 


410  JOAN  AND  PETER 

of  life;  its  acceptance  of  established  institutions  had  been 
artlessly  complete ;  it  had  never  challenged  the  authority  nor 
the  profits  of  the  proprietor.  It  had  never  proposed  more 
than  a  more  reasonable  treaty  with  the  masters,  a  fairer  shar- 
ing of  the  good  gifts  of  industry.  But  infatuated  by  the  evil 
teachings  of  an  extreme  individualism,  a  system  of  thought 
which  was  indeed  never  more  than  a  system  of  base  excuses 
dressed  up  as  a  philosophy,  the  directing  and  possessing 
classes  had  failed  altogether  to  agree  with  their  possible 
labour  adversary  quickly  while  they  were  yet  in  the  way  with 
him.  They  had  lacked  the  intelligence  to  create  a  sympa- 
thetic industrial  mentality,  and  the  conscience  to  establish 
a  standard  of  justice.  They  left  things  alone  until  the  grit 
of  a  formless  discontent  had  got  into  every  cog  of  the  in- 
dustrial machinery.  Too  late,  the  employers  were  now  con- 
ceding the  modest  demands  that  labour  had  made  in  the 
'eighties  and  'nineties,  they  were  trying  to  accept  the  oft'ers 
of  dead  men;  they  found  themselves  face  to  face  with  an 
entirely  less  accommodating  generation.  This  new  labour 
movement  was  talking  no  longer  of  shorter  hours  and  higher 
pay  but  of  the  social  revolution.  It  did  not  demand  better 
treatment  from  the  capitalist;  it  called  him  a  profiteer  and 
asked  him  to  vanish  from  the  body  politic.  It  organized 
strikes  now  not  to  alter  the  details  of  its  working  conditions 
as  its  predecessor  had  done,  but  in  order  to  end  the  system 
by  making  it  impossible.  In  Great  Britain  as  on  the  Con- 
tinent, the  younger  generation  of  labour  was  no  longer  asking 
to  have  the  harness  that  bound  it  to  the  old  order  made  easier 
and  lighter ;  it  was  asking  for  a  new  world. 

The  new  movement  seemed  to  men  of  Oswald's  generation 
to  come  as  thunderstorms  will  sometimes  come,  as  the  militant 
suffragette  had  seemed  to  come,  suddenly  out  of  a  clear  sky. 
But  it  was  far  more  ominous  than  the  suffragette  movement, 
for  while  that  made  one  simple  explicit  demand,  this  de- 
manded nothing  short  of  a  new  economic  order.  It  asked  for 
everything  and  would  be  content  with  nothing.  It  was  de- 
manding from  an  old  habitual  system  the  supreme  feat  of 
reconstruction.  Short  of  that  vague  general  reconstruction 
it  promised  no  peace.  Higher  wages  would  not  paeif.r  it : 
shorter  hours  would  not  pacify  it.  It  threatened  sabotage 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    411 

of  every  sort,  and  a  steady,  incessant  broadening  antagonism 
of  master  and  man.  Peter,  half  sympathetic  and  half  criti- 
cal, talked  about  it  to  Oswald  one  day. 

"They  all  say,  'I'm  a  Rebel!'  "  said  Peter.  "  'Rebel'  is 
their  cant  word." 

"Yes,  but  rebel  against  what?" 

"Oh!  the  whole  system." 

"They  have  votes." 

"They  get  humbugged,  they  say.  They  do,  you  know. 
The  party  system  is  a  swindle,  and  everybody  understands 
that.  Why  don't  we  clean  it  up?  P.R. 's  the  only  honest 
method.  They  don't  understand  how  it  is  rigged,  but  they 
know  it  is  rigged.  When  you  talk  about  Parliament  they 
laugh." 

"But  they  have  their  Unions." 

"They  don't  trust  their  leaders.  They  say  they  are  got 
at.  They  say  they  are  old-fashioned  and  bluffed  by  the 
politicians.  .  .  .  They  are.  ..." 

"Then  what  do  they  want?" 

"Just  to  be  out  of  all  this.  They  are  bored  to  tears  by 
their  work,  by  the  world  they  have  to  live  in,  by  the  pinched 
mean  lives  they  have  to  lead — in  the  midst  of  plenty  and 
luxury — bored  by  the  everlasting  dulness  and  humbug  of 
it  all." 

' '  But  how  are  they  going  to  alter  it  ? " 

"That's  all  vague.  Altogether  vague.  Cole  and  Mellor 
and  those  Cambridge  chaps  preach  Guild  Socialism  to  them, 
but  I  don't  know  how  far  they  take  it  in — except  that  they 
agree  that  profit  is  unnecessary.  But  the  fundamental  fact 
is  just  blind  boredom  and  the  desire  to  smash  up  things. 
Just  on  the  off  chance  of  their  coming  better.  The  employer 
has  been  free  to  make  the  world  for  them,  and  this  is  the 
world  he  has  made.  Damn  him!  That's  how  they  look  at 
it.  They  are  bored  by  his  face,  bored  by  his  automobile, 
bored  by  his  knighthood,  bored  by  his  country  house  and 
his  snob  of  a  wife " 

'  *  But  what  can  they  do  ?  " 

"Make  things  impossible." 

"They  can't  run  things  themselves." 

"They  aren't  convinced  of  that.     Anyhow  if  they  smash 


412  JOAN  AND  PETER 

up  things  the  employer  goes  first,  and  he's  the  chap  they 
seem  to  be  principally  after ' 

Peter  reflected.  Then  he  gave  a  modern  young  English- 
man's view  of  the  labour  conflict.  "The  employers  have 
been  pretty  tidy  asses  not  to  see  that  their  workpeople  get  a 
better,  more  amusing  life  than  they  do.  It  was  their  busi- 
ness and  their  interest  to  do  so.  It  could  have  been  managed 
easily.  But  they're  so  beastly  disloyal.  And  so  mean. 
They  not  only  sweat  labour  themselves  but  they  won't  stir 
a  finger  to  save  it  from  jerry-built  housing,  bad  provisioning, 
tally-men,  general  ugliness,  bad  investments,  rotten  insurance 
companies — every  kind  of  rotten  old  thing.  Any  one  may 
help  kill  their  sheep.  They've  got  no  gratitude  to  their 
workers.  They  won't  even  amuse  them.  Why  couldn't  they 
set  up  decent  theatres  for  them,  and  things  like  that?  It's 
so  stupid  of  them.  These  employers  are  the  most  dangerous 
class  in  the  community.  There 's  enough  for  every  one  now- 
adays and  over.  It's  the  first  business  of  employers  to  see 
workpeople  get  their  whack.  "What  good  are  they  if  they 
don't  do  that?  But  they  never  have.  Labour  is  convinced 
now  that  they  never  will.  They  run  about  pretending  to  be 
landed  gentry.  They've  got  their  people  angry  and  bitter 
now,  they've  destroyed  public  confidence  in  their  ways,  and 
it  serves  them  jolly  well  right  if  the  workmen  make  things 
impossible  for  them.  I  think  they  will.  I  hope  they  will." 

''But  this  means  breaking  up  the  national  industries,"  said 
Oswald.  "Where  is  this  sort  of  thing  going  to  end?" 

"Oh  !  things  want  shaking  up,"  said  Peter. 

"Perhaps,"  he  added,  "one  must  break  up  old  things 
before  one  can  hope  for  new.  I  suppose  the  masters  won 't  let 
go  while  they  think  there's  a  chance  of  holding  on.  ..." 

He  had  not  a  trace  left  of  the  Victorian  delusion  that  this 
might  after  all  be  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds.  He  thought 
that  our  politicians  and  our  captains  of  industry  were  very 
poor  muddlers  indeed.  They  drifted.  Each  one  sat  in  his 
own  works,  he  said,  and  ran  them  for  profit  without  caring  a 
rap  whither  the  whole  system  was  going.  Compared  with 
Labour  even  their  poverty  of  general  ideas  was  amazing. 
Peter,  warming  with  his  subject,  walked  to  and  fro  across 
the  Pelham  Ford  lawn  beside  Oswald,  proposing  to  rearrange 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    413 

industrialism  as  one  might  propose  to  reshuffle  a  pack  of 
cards. 

"But  suppose  things  smash  up,"  said  Oswald. 

"Smash  up,"  did  not  seem  to  alarm  Peter. 

"Nowadays,"  said  Peter,  "so  many  people  read  and  write, 
so  much  has  been  thought  out,  there  is  so  big  a  literature  of 
ideas  in  existence,  that  I  think  we  could  recover  from  a  very 
considerable  amount  of  smashing.  I  'm  pro-smash.  We  have 
to  smash.  What  holds  us  back  are  fixed  ideas.  Take  Profit. 
We're  used  to  Profit.  Most  business  is  done  for  profit  still. 
But  why  should  the  world  tolerate  profit  at  all?  It  doesn't 
stimulate  enterprise ;  it  only  stimulates  knavery.  And  Capi- 
tal, Financial  Capital  is  just  blackmail  by  gold — gold  rent. 
We  think  the  state  itself  even  can 't  start  a  business  going  or 
employ  people  without  first  borrowing  money.  Why  should 
it  borrow  money?  Why  not,  for  state  purposes,  create  it? 
Yes.  No  money  would  be  any  good  if  it  hadn't  the  state 
guarantee.  Gold  standard,  fixed  money  fund,  legitimate 
profits  and  so  on ;  that's  the  sort  of  fixed  idea  that  gets  in  the 
way  nowadays.  It  won 't  get  out  of  the  way  just  for  reason 's 
sake.  The  employers  keep  on  with  these  old  fixed  ideas, 
naturally,  because  so  it  is  they  have  been  made,  but  the  work- 
people believe  in  them  less  and  less.  There  must  be  a  smash 
of  some  sort — just  to  shake  ideas  loose.  ..." 

Oswald  surveyed  his  ward.  So  this  was  the  young  man's 
theory.  Not  a  bad  theory.  Fixed  Ideas! 

"There's  something  to  be  said  for  this  notion  of  Fixed 
Ideas,"  he  said.  "Yes.  But  isn't  this  'I'm  a  Rebel'  busi- 
ness, isn't  that  itself  a  Fixed  Idea?" 

"Oh  certainly!"  said  Peter  cheerfully.  "We  poor  human 
beings  are  always  letting  our  ideas  coagulate.  That's  where 
the  whole  business  seems  to  me  so  hopeless.  ..." 


§  8 

In  the  'eighties  and  'nineties  every  question  had  been 
positive  and  objective.  "People,"  you  said,  "think  so  and 
so.  Is  it  right?"  That  seemed  to  cover  the  grounds  for 
discussion  in  those  days.  One  believed  in  a  superior  uni- 


414  JOAN  AND  PETER 

versal  reason  to  which  all  decisions  must  ultimately  bow. 
The  new  generation  was  beginning  where  its  predecessors  left 
off,  with  what  had  been  open  questions  decided  and  carried 
beyond  discussion.  It  was  at  home  now  on  what  had  once 
been  battlefields  of  opinion.  The  new  generation  was  read- 
ing William  James  and  Bergson  and  Freud  and  becoming 
more  and  more  psychological.  ' 'People,"  it  said,  "think  so 
and  so.  Why  do  they  do  so?" 

So  when  at  last  Oswald  carried  off  Peter  to  Dublin — which 
he  did  not  do  at  Easter  as  he  had  planned  but  at  Whitsun- 
tide for  a  mere  long  week-end — to  see  at  close  hand  this  per- 
plexing Irish  Question  that  seemed  drifting  steadily  and  un- 
controllably towards  bloodshed,  he  found  that  while  he  was 
asking  "who  is  in  the  right  and  who  is  in  the  wrong  here? 
Who  is  most  to  blame  and  who  should  have  the  upper  hand?" 
Peter  was  asking  with  a  terrible  impartiality,  "Why  are  all 
these  people  talking  nonsense?"  and  "Why  have  they  got 
their  minds  and  affairs  into  this  dangerous  mess?"  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett,  Peter  had  a  certain  toleration  for;  but  it 
was  evident  he  suspected  A.E.  Peter  did  not  talk  very  much, 
but  he  listened  with  a  bright  scepticism  to  brilliant  displays 
of  good  talk — he  had  never  heard  such  good  anecdotal  talk 
before — and  betrayed  rather  than  expressed  his  conviction 
that  Nationalism,  Larkinism,  Sinn  Feinism,  Ulsterism  and 
Unionism  were  all  insults  to  the  human  intelligence,  material 
for  the  alienist  rather  than  serious  propositions. 

It  wasn't  that  he  felt  himself  to  be  in  possession  of  any 
conclusive,  solution,  or  that  he  obtruded  his  disbelief  with 
any  sense  of  superiority.  In  spite  of  his  extreme  youth  he 
did  not  for  a  moment  assume  the  attitude  of  a  superior  per- 
son. Life  was  evidently  troubling  him  profoundly,  and  he 
was  realizing  that  there  was  no  apparent  answer  to  many  of 
his  perplexities.  But  he  was  at  least  trying  hard  to  get  an 
answer.  What  shocked  him  in  the  world  of  Dublin  was  its 
manifest  disinclination  to  get  any  answer  to  anything.  They 
jeered  at  people  who  sought  solutions.  They  liked  the  fun 
of  disorder;  it  gave  more  scope  for  their  irrepressible  pas- 
sion for  character  study.  He  began  to  recognize  one  particu- 
lar phrase  as  the  keynote  of  Dublin's  animation:  "Hev  ye 
hurrd  theletest?" 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         415 

On  the  Sunday  afternoon  of  their  stay  in  Dublin,  Powys 
motored  them  through  the  city  by  way  of  Donnybrook  and 
so  on  round  the  bay  to  Howth  to  see  the  view  from  Howth 
Head.  Powys  drove  with  a  stray  guest  beside  him.  Behind, 
Peter  imparted  impressions  to  Oswald. 

"I  don't  like  these  high  walls,"  he  said.  "I've  never  seen 
such  a  lot  of  high  walls.  ...  It's  just  as  if  they  all  shut 
themselves  in  from  one  another." 

"Fixed  Ideas,  Peter?" 

"They  are  rather  like  Fixed  Ideas.  I  suppose  high  walls 
are  fun  to  climb  over  and  throw  things  over.  But — it's  un- 
civilized." 

"Everybody,"  grumbled  Peter,  "is  given  to  fixed  ideas, 
but  the  Irish  have  'em  for  choice.  All  this  rot  about  Ireland 
a  Nation  and  about  the  Harp,  which  isn  't  properly  their  sym- 
bol, and  the  dear  old  Green  Flag  which  isn 't  properly  their 
colour !  .  .  .  They  can 't  believe  in  that  stuff  nowadays.  .  .  . 
But  can  they  ?  In  our  big  world  ?  And  about  being  a  Black 
Protestant  and  pretending  Catholics  are  poison,  or  the  other 
way  round.  What  are  Protestants  and  Catholics  now?  .  .  . 
Old  dead  squabbles.  .  .  .  Dead  as  Druids.  .  .  .  Keeping  up 
all  that  bickering  stuff,  when  a  child  of  eight  ought  to 
know  nowadays  that  the  Christian  God  started  out  to  be  a 
universal,  charitable  God.  ...  If  Christ  came  to  Dublin  the 
Catholics  and  Protestants  would  have  a  free  fight  to  settle 
which  was  to  crucify  Him.  ..." 

"It's  the  way  with  them,"  said  Oswald.  "We've  got  to 
respect  Irish  opinion." 

"It  doesn't  respect  itself.  Everywhere  else  in  the  world, 
wherever  we  have  been,  there's  been  at  least  something  like 
the  germ  of  an  idea  of  a  new  life.  But  here!  When  you 
get  over  here  you  realize  for  the  first  time  that  England  is 
after  all  a  living  country  trying  to  get  on  to  something — 
compared  with  this  merry-go-round.  ...  It's  exactly  like  a 
merry-go-round  churning  away.  It's  the  atmosphere  of  a 
country  fair.  An  Irishman  hasn't  any  idea  of  a  future  at 
all,  so  far  as  I  can  see — except  that  perhaps  his  grandchildren 
will  tell  stories  of  what  a  fine  fellow  he  was.  ..." 

The  automobile  halted  for  a  moment  at  cross  roads,  and  the 
finger-post  was  in  Erse  characters. 


416  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Look  at  that!"  said  Peter  with  genuine  exasperation. 
"And  hardly  a  Dubliner  knows  fifty  words  of  the  language! 
It 's  foolery.  If  we  were  Irish  I  suppose  we  should  smother 
London  with  black-letter.  We  should  go  on  pretending  that 
we,  too,  were  still  Catholics  and  Protestants.  The  pseudo- 
Protestants  would  hang  Smithfield  with  black  on  account  of 
the  martyrs,  and  the  pseudo-Catholics  would  come  and  throw 
the  meat  about  on  Fridays.  Chesterton  and  Belloc  would 
love  it  anyhow."  .  .  . 

Oswald  was  not  sure  of  the  extent  of  Peter's  audience. 
"The  susceptibilities  of  a  proud  people,  Peter,"  he  whis- 
pered, with  his  eye  on  the  back  of  their  host. 

"Bother  their  susceptibilities.  Much  they  care  for  our 
susceptibilities.  The  worst  insult  you  can  offer  a  grown-up 
man  is  to  humour  him,"  said  Peter.  "What's  the  good  of 
pretending  to  be  sympathetic  with  all  this  Wearing  of  the 
Green.  It's  like  our  White  Rose  League.  Let  'em  do  it  by 
all  means  if  they  want  to,  but  don 't  let 's  pretend  we  think  it 
romantic  and  beautiful  and  all  the  rest  of  it.  It's  just  posing 
and  dressing  up,  and  it's  a  nuisance,  Nobby.  All  Dublin  is 
posing  and  dressing  up  and  playing  at  rebellion,  and  so  is 
all  Ulster.  The  Volunteers  of  the  eighteenth  century  all  over 
again.  It's  like  historical  charades.  And  they've  pointed 
loaded  guns  at  each  other.  Only  idiots  point  loaded  guns. 
Why  can't  we  English  get  out  of  it  all,  and  leave  them  to 
pose  and  dress  up  and  then  tell  anecdotes  and  anecdotes  and 
anecdotes  about  it  until  they  are  sick  of  it?  If  ever  they 
are  sick  of  it.  Let  them  have  their  Civil  War  if  they  want 
it ;  let  them  keep  on  with  Civil  Wars  for  ever ;  what  has  it  got 
to  do  with  us?" 

"You're  a  Home  Ruler  then,"  said  Oswald. 

"I  don't  see  that  we  English  do  any  good  here  at  all. 
What  are  we  here  for  anyhow?  The  Castle's  just  another 
Fixed  Idea,  something  we  haven 't  the  mental  vigour  to  clear 
away.  Nobody  does  any  good  here.  We're  not  giving  them 
new  ideas,  we  're  not  unifying  them,  we  're  not  letting  Ireland 
out  into  the  world — which  is  what  she  wants — we're  not 
doing  anything  but  just  holding  on. ' ' 

"What's  that?"  said  Powys  suddenly  over  his  shoulder. 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         417 

"Peter's  declaring  for  Home  Rule,"  said  Oswald. 
"After  his  glimpse  of  the  slums  of  Dublin?" 
"It's  out  of  malice.     He   wants   to   leave   Irishmen   to 
Irishmen." 

"Ulster  says  No!"  said  Powys.  "Tell  him  to  talk  to 
Ulster, ' '  and  resumed  a  conversation  he  had  interrupted  with 
the  man  beside  him. 

At  the  corner  where  Nassau  Street  runs  into  Grafton 
Street  they  were  held  up  for  some  lengthy  minutes  by  a  long 
procession  that  was  trailing  past  Trinity  College  and  down 
Grafton  Street.  It  had  several  bands,  and  in  the  forefront 
of  it  went  National  Volunteers  in  green  uniforms,  obviously 
for  the  most  part  old  soldiers;  they  were  followed  by  men 
with  green  badges,  and  then  a  straggle  of  Larkinites  and 
various  Friendly  Societies  with  their  bands  and  banners,  and 
then  by  a  long  dribble  of  children  and  then  some  workgirls, 
and  then  a  miscellany  of  people  who  had  apparently  fallen  in 
as  the  procession  passed  because  they  had  nothing  else  to  do. 
As  a  procession  it  was  tedious  rather  than  impressive.  The 
warm  afternoon — it  was  the  last  day  in  May — had  taken  the 
good  feeling  out  of  the  walkers.  Few  talked,  still  fewer 
smiled.  The  common  expression  wyas  a  long-visaged  discon- 
tent, a  gloomy  hostile  stare  at  the  cars  and  police  cordon,  an 
aimless  disagreeableness.  They  were  all  being  very  stern 
and  resolute  about  they  did  not  quite  know  what.  They 
meant  to  show  that  Dublin  could  be  as  stern  and  resolute 
as  Belfast.  Between  the  parts  of  the  procession  were  lengthy 
craps.  It  was  a  sunshiny,  dusty  afternoon,  and  the  legs  of 
the  processionists  were  dusty  to  the  knees,  their  brows  moist, 
and  their  lips  dry.  There  was  an  unhurried  air  about  them 
of  going  nowhere  in  particular.  It  was  evident  that  many 
of  their  banners  were  heavy.  "What's  it  all  about?"  asked 
Oswald. 

"Lord  knows,"  said  Powys  impatiently.  "It's  just  a 
demonstration." 

"Is  that  all?     Why  don't  we  cut  across  now  and  get  on?" 
"There's  more  coming.     Don't  you  hear  another  band?" 
"But  the  police  could  hold  it  up  for  a  minute  and  let  all 
these  tramcars  and  automobiles  across. ' ' 


418  JOAN  AND  PETER 

" There 'd  be  a  fight,"  said  Powys.     "They  daren't."  .  .  . 

''And  I  suppose  this  sort  of  thing  is  going  on  in  the  north 
too?"  asked  Oswald  after  a  pause. 

"Oh !  everywhere,"  said  Powys.  "Orange  or  Green.  But 
they've  got  more  guns  up  north." 

"These  people  don't  really  want  Ireland  a  Nation  and  all 
the  rest  of  it,"  said  Peter. 

"Oh?"  said  Powys,  staring  at  him. 

"Well,  look  at  them,"  said  Peter.  "You  can  see  by  their 
faces.  They're  just  bored  to  death.  I  suppose  most  people 
are  bored  to  death  in  Ireland.  There's  nothing  doing.  Eng- 
land just  holds  them  up,  I  suppose.  And  it's  an  island — 
rather  off  the  main  line.  There's  nothing  to  get  people's 
minds  off  these  endless,  dreary  old  quarrels.  It's  all  they 
have.  But  they're  bored  by  it.  .  .  ." 

"And  that's  why  we  talk  nothing  but  anecdotes,  Peter, 
eh?"  Powys  grinned. 

"Well,  you  do  talk  a  lot  of  anecdote,"  said  Peter,  who 
hadn't  realized  the  sharpness  of  his  host's  hearing. 

"Oh !  we  do.  I  don't  complain  of  your  seeing  it.  It  isn't 
your  discovery.  Have  you  read  or  heard  the  truest  words 
that  were  ever  said  of  Ireland — by  that  man  Shaw  ?  In  John 
Bull's  Other  Island.  .  .  .  That  laughing  scene  about  the 
pig.  'Nowhere  else  could  such  a  scene  cause  a  burst  of  hap- 
piness among  the  people.'  That's  the  very  guts  of  things 
here;  eh?" 

"It's  his  best  play,"  said  Oswald,  avoiding  too  complete 
an  assent. 

"It  gets  there,"  Powys  admitted,  "anyhow.  The  way  all 
them  fools  come  into  the  shanty  and  snigger."  .  .  . 

The  last  dregs  of  the  procession  passed  reluctantly  out  of 
the  way.  It  faded  down  Grafton  Street  into  a  dust  cloud 
and  a  confusion  of  band  noises.  The  policemen  prepared  to 
release  the  congested  traffic.  Peter  leaned  out  to  count  the 
number  of  trams  and  automobiles  that  had  been  held  up. 
He  was  still  counting  when  the  automobile  turned  the  corner. 

They  shook  Dublin  off  and  spun  cheerfully  through  the 
sunshine  along  the  coast  road  to  Howth.  It  was  a  sparkling 
bright  afternoon,  and  the  road  was  cheerful  with  the  prim 


THE  WORLD  OX  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    419 

happiness  of  many  couples  of  Irish  lovers.  But  that  after- 
noon peace  was  the  mask  worn  by  one  particular  day.  If  the 
near  future  could  have  cast  a  phantom  they  would  have  seen 
along  this  road  a  few  weeks  ahead  of  them  the  gun-runners 
of  Howth  marching  to  the  first  foolish  bloodshed  in  Dublin 
streets.  .  .  . 

They  saw  Howth  Castle,  made  up  now  by  Lutyens  to  look 
as  it  ought  to  have  looked  and  never  had  looked  in  the  past. 
The  friend  Powys  had  brought  wanted  to  talk  to  some  of 
the  castle  people,  and  while  these  two  stayed  behind  Oswald 
and  Peter  went  on,  between  high  hedges  of  clipped  beech  and 
up  a  steep,  winding  path  amidst  great  bushes  of  rhododen- 
dron in  full  flower  to  the  grey  rock  and  heather  of  the  crest. 
They  stood  in  the  midst  of  one  of  the  most  beautiful  views 
in  the  world.  Northward  they  looked  over  Ireland's  Eye  at 
Lambay  and  the  blue  Mourne  mountains  far  away ;  eastward 
was  the  lush  green  of  Meath,  southward  was  the  long  beach  of 
the  bay  sweeping  round  by  Dublin  to  Dalkey,  backed  by 
more  blue  mountains  that  ran  out  eastward  to  the  Sugar 
Loaf.  Below  their  feet  the  pale  castle  clustered  amidst  its 
rich  greenery,  and  to  the  east,  the  level  blue  sea  sustained 
one  single  sunlit  sail.  It  was  rare  that  the  sense  of  beauty 
flooded  Peter,  as  so  often  it  flooded  Joan,  but  this  time  he  was 
transported. 

"But  this  is  altogether  beautiful,"  he  said,  like  one  who 
is  taken  by  surprise. 

And  then  as  if  to  himself:  "How  beautiful  life  might  be! 
How  splendid  life  might  be!" 

Oswald  was  standing  on  a  ledge  below  Peter,  and  with  his 
back  to  him.  He  waited  through  a  little  interval  to  see  if 
Peter  would  say  any  more.  Then  he  pricked  him  with  "only 
it  isn't." 

"No,"  said  Peter,  with  the  sunlight  gone  out  of  his  voice. 
"It  isn't." 

He  went  on  talking  after  a  moment 's  reflection. 

"It's  as  if  we  were  hypnotized  and  couldn't  get  away 
from  mean  things,  beastly  suspicions,  and  stale  quarrels.  I 
suppose  we  are  still  half  apes.  I  suppose  our  brains  set  too 
easily  and  rapidly.  I  suppose  it's  easy  to  quarrel  yet  and 


420  JOAN  AND  PETEE 

still  hard  to  understand.  We  take  to  jealousy  and  bitterness 
as  ducklings  take  to  water.  Think  of  that  stale,  dusty  pro- 
cession away  there ! ' ' 

Oswald's  old  dream  vision  of  the  dark  forest  came  back 
to  his  mind.  "Is  there  no  way  out,  Peter?"  he  said. 

"If  some  great  idea  would  take  hold  of  the  world!"  said 
Peter.  .  .  . 

"There  have  been  some  great  ideas,"  said  Oswald.  .  .  . 

"If  it  would  take  hold  of  one's  life,"  Peter  finished  his 
thought.  .  .  . 

"There  has  been  Christianity,"  said  Oswald. 

"Christianity!"  Peter  pointed  at  the  distant  mist  that  was 
Dublin.  "Sour  Protestants,"  he  said,  "and  dirty  priests 
setting  simple  people  by  the  ears. ' ' 

"But  that  isn't  true  Christianity." 

"There  isn't  true  Christianity,"  said  Peter  compactly.  .  .  . 

"Well,  there's  love  of  country  then,"  said  Oswald. 

"That  Dublin  corporation  is  the  most  patriotic  and  nation- 
alist in  the  world.  Fierce  about  it.  And  it's  got  complete 
control  there.  It's  green  in  grain.  No  English  need  apply. 
.  .  .  From  the  point  of  view  of  administration  that  town  is 
a  muck  heap — for  patriotic  Growings.  Look  at  their  dirty, 
ill-paved  streets.  Look  at  their  filthy  slums !  See  how  they 
let  their  blessed  nation's  children  fester  and  die!" 

"There  are  bigger  ideas  than  patriotism.     There  are  ideas 
of  empire,  the  Pax  Britannica." 
'  Carson  smuggling  guns. ' ' 
'Well,  is  there  nothing?     Do  you  know  of  nothing?" 

Dswald  turned  on  his  ward  for  the  reply. 
'  There 's  a  sort  of  idea,  I  suppose. ' ' 
'But  what  idea?" 
'There's  an  idea  in  our  minds." 
'But  what  is  it,  Peter?" 
'Call  it  Civilization,"  Peter  tried. 

'I  believe,"  he  went  on,  weighing  his  words  carefully,  "as 
you  believe  really,  in  the  Republic  of  Mankind,  in  universal 
work  for  a  common  end — for  freedom,  welfare,  and  beauty. 
Haven't  you  taught  me  that?" 

"Have  I  taught  you  that?" 

' '  It  seems  to  me  to  be  the  commonsense  aim  for  all  human- 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    421 

ity.  You're  awake  to  it.  You've  awakened  me  to  it  and  I 
believe  in  it.  But  most  of  this  world  is  still  deep  in  its  old 
Fixed  Ideas,  walking  in  its  sleep.  And  it  won't  wake  up. 
It  won't  wake  up.  .  .  .  What  can  we  dof  We've  got  to  a 
sort  of  idea,  it's  true.  But  here  are  these  Irish,  for  example, 
naturally  wittier  and  quicker  than  you  or  I,  hypnotized  by 
Orange  and  Green,  by  Protestant  and  Catholic,  by  all  these 
stale  things — drifting  towards  murder.  It's  murder  is  com- 
ing here.  You  can  smell  the  bloodshed  coming  on  the  air — 
and  we  can't  do  a  thing  to  prevent  it.  Not  a  thing.  The 
silliest  bloodshed  it  will  be.  The  silliest  bloodshed  the  world 
has  ever  seen.  We  can't  do  a  thing  to  wake  them  up.  .  .  . 

"We're  in  it,"  said  Peter  in  conclusion.  "We  can't  even 
save  ourselves." 

"I've  been  wanting  to  get  at  your  political  ideas  for  a 
long  time,"  said  Oswald.  "You  really  think,  Peter,  there 
might  be  a  big  world  civilization,  a  world  republic,  did  you 
call  it? — without  a  single  slum  hidden  in  it  anywhere,  with 
the  whole  of  mankind  busy  and  happy,  the  races  living  in 
peace,  each  according  to  its  aptitudes,  a  world  going  on — 
going  on  steady  and  swift  to  still  better  things." 

"How  can  one  believe  anything  else?     Don't  you?" 

"But  how  do  we  get  there,  Peter?" 

"Oh,  how  do  we  get  there?"  echoed  Peter.  "How  do  we 
get  there?" 

He  danced  a  couple  of  steps  with  vexation. 

"I  don't  know,  Nobby,"  he  cried.  "I  don't  know.  I 
can 't  find  the  way.  I 'm  making  a  mess  of  my  life.  I'm  not 
getting  on  with  my  work.  You  know  I'm  not.  .  .  .  Either 
we're  mad  or  this  world  is.  Here's  all  these  people  in  Ire- 
land letting  a  solemn  humbug  of  a  second-rate  lawyer  with 
a  heavy  chin  and  a  lumpish  mind  muddle  them  into  a  civil 
war — and  that's  reality!  That's  life!  The  solemn  League 
and  Covenant — copied  out  of  old  history  books!  That's 
being  serious!  And  over  there  in  England,  across  the  sea, 
muddle  and  muck  and  nonsense  indescribable.  Oh!  and 
we  're  in  it ! " 

"But  aren't  there  big  movements  afoot,  Peter,  social  re- 
form, the  labour  movement,  the  emancipation  of  women,  big 
changes  like  that?" 


422  JOAN  AND  PETEK 

"Only  big  discontents." 
''But  doesn't  discontent  make  the  change?" 
"It's  just  boredom,  that's  got  them.  It  isn't  any  disposi- 
tion to  make.  Labour  is  bored,  women  are  bored,  all  Ireland 
is  bored.  I  suppose  Eussia  is  bored  and  Germany  is  getting 
bored.  She  is  boring  all  the  world  with  her  soldiering.  How 
bored  they  must  be  in  India  too — by  us !  The  day  bores  its 
way  round  the  earth  now — like  a  mole.  Out  of  sight  of  the 
stars.  But  boring  people  doesn't  mean  making  a  new  world. 
It  just  means  boring  on  to  decay.  It  just  means  one  sort  of 
foolish  old  fixed  idea  rubbing  and  sawing  against  another, 
until  something  breaks  down.  .  .  .  Oh!  I  want  to  get  out  of 
all  this.  I  don 't  like  this  world  of  ours.  I  want  to  get  into 
a  world  awake.  I'm  young  and  I'm  greedy.  I've  only  got 
one  life  to  live,  Nobby.  ...  I  want  to  spend  it  where  some- 
thing is  being  made.  Made  for  good  and  all.  Where  clever 
men  can  do  something  more  than  sit  overlong  at  meals  and 
tell  spiteful  funny  stories.  Where  there's  something  better 
to  do  than  play  about  with  one 's  brain  and  viscera !  .  .  . " 


§  9 

In  the  days  when  Peter  was  born  the  Anglican  system 
held  the  Empire  with  apparently  invincible  feelings  of  secur- 
ity and  self-approval;  it  possessed  the  land,  the  church,  the 
army,  the  foreign  office,  the  court.  Such  people  as  Arthur 
and  Dolly  were  of  no  more  account  than  a  stray  foreign  gipsy 
by  the  wayside.  When  Peter  came  of  age  the  Anglican  sys- 
tem still  held  on  to  army,  foreign  office,  court,  land,  and 
church,  but  now  it  was  haunted  by  a  sense  of  an  impalpable 
yet  gigantic  antagonism  that  might  at  any  time  materialize 
against  it.  It  had  an  instinctive  perception  of  the  near 
possibility  of  a  new  world  in  which  its  base  prides  could  have 
no  adequate  satisfaction,  in  which  its  authority  would  be 
flouted,  its  poor  learning  despised,  and  its  precedents  disre- 
garded. The  curious  student  of  the  history  of  England  in 
the  decade  before  the  Great  War  will  find  the  clue  to  what 
must  otherwise  seem  a  hopeless  tangle  in  the  steady,  disin- 
genuous, mischievous  antagonism  of  the  old  Anglican  system 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    423 

to  every  kind  of  change  that  might  bring  nearer  the  dreaded 
processes  of  modernization.  Education,  and  particularly 
university,  reform  was  blocked,  the  most  necessary  social 
legislation  fought  against  with  incoherent  passion,  the  light- 
est, most  reasonable  taxation  of  land  or  inheritance  resisted. 

Wherever  the  old  system  could  find  allies  it  snatched  at 
them  and  sought  to  incorporate  them  with  itself.  It  had  long 
since  taken  over  the  New  Imperialism  with  its  tariff  schemes 
•and  its  spirit  of  financial  adventure.  It  had  sneered  aloof 
when  the  new  democracy  of  the  elementary  schools  sought  to 
read  and  think;  it  had  let  any  casual  adventurer  to  supply 
that  reading ;  but  now  the  creator  of  Answers  and  Comic  Cuts 
ruled  the  Times  and  sat  in  the  House  of  Lords.  It  was  a 
little  doubtful  still  whether  he  was  of  the  new  order  or  the 
old,  whether  he  was  not  himself  an  instalment  of  revolution, 
whether  the  Tories  had  bought  him  or  whether  he  had  bought 
them,  but  at  any  rate  he  did  for  a  time  seem  to  be  serving 
the  ends  of  reaction. 

To  two  sources  of  strength  the  Anglicans  clung  with  des- 
perate resolution,  India  and  Ulster.  From  India  the  mass 
of  English  people  were  shut  and  barred  off  as  completely  as 
ajiy  foreigners  could  have  been.  India  was  the  preserve  of 
the  "ruling  class."  To  India  the  good  Anglican,  smitten  by 
doubts,  chilled  by  some  disrespectful  comment  or  distressed 
by  some  item  of  progress  achieved,  could  turn,  leaving  all 
thoughts  of  new  and  unpleasant  things  behind  him ;  there  in 
what  he  loved  to  believe  was  the  "unchanging  East"  he  could 
recover  that  sense  of  walking  freely  and  authoritatively  upon 
an  abundance  of  inferior  people  which  was  so  necessary  to 
his  nature,  and  which  was  being  so  seriously  impaired  at 
home.  The  institution  of  caste  realized  his  secret  ideals. 
From  India  he  and  his  womankind  could  return  refreshed,  to 
the  struggle  with  Liberalism  and  all  the  powers  of  democratic 
irreverence  in  England.  And  Ulster  was  a  still  more  pre- 
cious stronghold  for  this  narrow  culture.  From  the  fastness 
of  Ulster  they  could  provoke  the  restless  temperament  of  the 
Irish  to  a  thousand  petty  exasperations  of  the  English,  and 
for  Ulster,  "loyal  Ulster,"  they  could  appeal  to  the  generous 
partisanship  of  the  English  against  their  native  liberalism. 
More  and  more  did  it  become  evident  that  Ulster  was  the  key- 


424  JOAN  AND  PETER 

stone  of  the  whole  Anglican  ascendancy;  to  that  they  owed 
their  grip  upon  British  politics,  upon  army,  navy,  and  educa- 
tion ;  they  traded — nay !  they  existed — upon  the  open  Irish 
sore.  With  Ireland  healed  and  contented  England  would 
be  lost  to  them.  England  would  democratize,  would  Ameri- 
canize. The  Anglicans  would  vanish  out  of  British  life  as 
completely  as  the  kindred  Tories  vanished  out  of  America 
at  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century.  And  when  at  last, 
after  years  of  confused  bickering,  a  Home  Rule  Bill  became1 
law,  and  peace  between  the  two  nations  in  Ireland  seemed 
possible,  the  Anglicans  stepped  at  once  from  legal  obstruc- 
tion to  open  treason  and  revolt.  The  arming  of  Ulster  to 
resist  the  decision  of  Parliament  was  incited  from  Great 
Britain,  it  was  supported  enthusiastically  by  the  whole  of  the 
Unionist  party  in  Great  Britain,  its  headquarters  were  in  the 
west  end  of  London,  and  the  refusal  of  General  Gough  to 
carry  out  the  precautionary  occupation  of  Ulster  was  hailed 
with  wild  joy  in  every  Tory  home.  It  was  not  a  genuine 
popular  movement,  it  was  an  artificial  movement  for  which 
the  landowning  church  people  of  Ireland  and  England  were 
chiefly  responsible.  It  was  assisted  by  tremendous  exertions 
on  the  part  of  the  London  yellow  press.  When  Sir  Edward 
Carson  went  about  Ulster  in  that  warm  June  of  1914,  review- 
ing armed  men,  promising  "more  Mausers,"  and  pouring  out 
inflammatory  speeches,  he  was  manifestly  preparing  blood- 
shed. The  old  Tory  system  had  reached  a  point  where  it 
had  to  kill  men  or  go. 

And  it  did  not  mean  to  go ;  it  meant  to  kill.  It  meant  to 
murder  men. 

If  youth  and  the  new  ideas  were  to  go  on  with  the  world, 
the  price  was  blood. 

Ulster  was  a  little  country;  altogether  the  dispute  did  not 
affect  many  thousands  of  men,  but  except  for  the  difference 
in  scale  there  was  indeed  hardly  any  difference  at  all  between 
this  scramble  towards  civil  conflict  in  Ireland  and  the  rush, 
swift  and  noiseless,  that  was  now  carrying  central  Europe 
towards  immeasurable  bloodshed.  To  kill  and  mutilate  and 
waste  five  human  beings  in  a  petty  riot  is  in  its  essence  no 
less  vile  a  crime  than  to  kill  and  mutilate  and  waste  twenty 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    425 

millions.  While  the  British  Tories  counted  their  thousands, 
the  Kaiser  and  his  general  staff  reckoned  in  millions;  while 
the  British  "loyalists"  were  smuggling  a  few  disused  ma- 
chine-guns from  Germany,  Krupp's  factories  were  turning 
out  great  guns  by  the  hundred.  But  the  evil  thing  was  the 
same  evil  thing;  a  system  narrow  and  outworn,  full  of  a 
vague  fear  of  human  reason  and  the  common  sense  of  man- 
kind, full  of  pride  and  greed  and  the  insolent  desire  to 
trample  upon  men,  a  great  system  of  false  assumptions  and 
fixed  ideas,  oppressed  by  a  thirsty  necessity  for  reassurance, 
was  seeking  the  refreshment  of  loud  self-assertion  and  pre- 
paring to  drink  blood.  The  militarist  system  that  centred 
upon  Potsdam  had  clambered  to  a  point  where  it  had  to  kill 
men  or  go.  The  Balkans  were  the  Ulster  of  Europe.  If  once 
this  Balkan  trouble  settled  down,  an  age  of  peace  might  dawn 
for  Europe,  and  how  would  Junkerdom  fare  then,  and  where 
would  Fran  Bertha  sell  her  goods?  How  would  the  War 
Lord  justify  his  glories  to  the  social  democrat?  .  .  . 

But  Oswald,  like  most  Englishmen,  was  not  attending  very 
closely  to  affairs  upon  the  Continent.  He  was  preoccupied 
with  the  unreason  of  Ulster. 

Recently  he  had  had  a  curious  interview  with  Lady  Char- 
lotte Sydenham,  and  her  white  excited  face  and  blazing  blue 
eyes  insisted  now  upon  playing  the  part  of  mask  to  the  Ulster 
spirit  in  his  thoughts.  She  had  had  to  call  him  in  because  she 
had  run  short  of  ready  money  through  over-subscription  to 
various  schemes  for  arming  the  northern  patriots.  She  had 
sat  at  her  writing-desk  with  her  cap  a  little  over  one  eye,  as 
though  it  was  a  military  cap,  and  the  tuft  of  reddish  hair 
upon  her  cheek  more  like  bristles  than  ever,  and  he  had 
walked  about  the  room  contriving  disagreeable  things  to  say 
to  her  after  his  wont.  He  was  disinclined  to  let  her  have 
more  money,  he  confessed ;  she  ought  to  have  had  more  sense, 
he  said,  than  to  write  off  big  cheques,  cheques  beyond  her 
means,  in  support  of  this  seditious  mischief.  If  she  asked 
these  people  who  had  taken  her  money,  probably  they  would 
let  her  have  some  back  to  go  on  with. 

This  enraged  her  nicely,  as  he  had  meant  it  to  do.  She 
scolded  at  him.  A  nice  Sydenham  he  was,  to  see  his  King 


426  JOAN  AND  PETER 

insulted  and  his  country  torn  apart,  He  who  had  once  worn 
the  Queen's  uniform.  Thank  God!  she  herself  was  a  Par- 
minter  and  belonged  to  a  sounder  strain ! 

"It's  you  who  are  insulting  the  King,"  Oswald  interpo- 
lated, ' '  trying  to  defy  his  Acts  in  Parliament. ' ' 

"Oh!"  cried  Lady  Charlotte,  banging  the  desk  with  her 
freckled  fist.  "Oh!  Parliament!  I'd  shoot  'em  down! 
First  that  vile  Budget,  then  the  attack  on  the  Lords." 

"They  passed  the  Parliament  Act,"  said  Oswald. 

"To  save  themselves  from  being  swamped  in  a  horde  of 
working-men  peers — sitting  there  in  their  caps  with  their 
dirty  boots  on  the  cushions.  Lord  Keir  Hardie!  You'll 
want  Lord  Chimneysweep  and  Viscount  Cats-meatman  next. 
.  .  .  Then  came  that  abominable  Insurance  Act — one  thing 
worse  than  another!  Setting  class  against  class  and  giving 
them  ideas!  Then  we  gave  up  South  Africa  to  the  Boers 
again!  What  did  we  fight  for?  Didn't  we  buy  the  country 
with  our  blood?  Why,  my  poor  cousin  Rupert  Parminter 
was  a  prisoner  in  Pretoria  for  a  whole  year — thirteen  weary 
months!  For  nothing!  And  now  Ireland  is  to  be  handed 
over  to  priests  and  rebels.  To  Irishmen!  And  I — I  am  not 
to  lift  a  finger,  not  a  finger,  to  save  my  King  and  my  Country 
and  my  God — when  they  are  all  going  straight  to  the  Devil !" 

"H'm,"  said  Oswald,  rustling  the  counterfoils  in  his  hand. 
"But  you  have  been  lifting  your  finger,  you  know!" 

"If  I  could  give  more " 

"You  have  given  more." 

"I'd  give  it." 

"Won't  Grimes  make  a  friendly  advance?  But  I  suppose 
you're  up  to  the  neck  with  Grimes.  ...  I  wonder  what  in- 
terest that  little  swindler  charges  you." 

The  old  lady  could  not  meet  the  mild  scrutiny  of  his  eye. 
"You  come  here  and  grin  and  mock  while  your  country  is 
being  handed  over  to  a  gang  of  God-knows-whos ! "  she  said, 
staring  at  her  inkpot. 

"To  whom  probably  it  belongs  as  much  as  it  does  to  me," 
said  Oswald. 

"Thank  God  the  army  is  sound,"  said  Aunt  Charlotte. 
"Thank  God  this  doesn't  end  with  your  Parliaments!  Mark 
my  words,  Oswald !  On  the  day  they  raise  their  Home  Rule 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    427 

flag  in  Ireland  there  will  be  men  shot  down — men  shot  down. 
A  grim  lesson. ' ' 

"Some  perhaps  killed  by  your  own  particular  cheques," 
said  Oswald.  "Who  knows?" 

"I  hope  so,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  with  a  quiver  of  deep 
passion  in  her  voice.  "  I  hope  so  sincerely.  If  I  could  think 
I  had  caused  the  death  of  one  of  those  traitors.  ...  If  it 
could  be  Lloyd  George!"  .  .  . 

But  that  was  too  much  apparently  even  for  Lady  Char- 
lotte to  hope  for. 

Oswald,  when  he  had  come  to  her,  had  fully  intended  to  let 
her  have  money  to  go  on  with,  but  now  he  was  changing  his 
mind.  He  had  thought  of  her  hitherto  just  as  a  grotesque 
figure  in  his  life,  part  of  the  joke  of  existence,  but  now  with 
this  worry  of  the  Irish  business  in  his  mind  he  found  himself 
regarding  her  as  something  more  than  an  individual.  She 
seemed  now  to  be  the  accentuated  voice  of  a  whole  class,  the 
embodiment  of  a  class  tradition.  He  strolled  back  from  the 
window  and  stood  with  his  hands  deep  in  his  trouser  pockets 
— which  always  annoyed  her — and  his  head  on  one  side,  focus- 
ing the  lady. 

"My  dear  Aunt,"  he  said,  "what  right  have  you  to  any 
voice  in  politics  at  all?  You  know,  you're  pretty — ungra- 
cious. The  world  lets  you  have  this  money — and  you  spend 
it  in  organizing  murder." 

"The  world  lets  me  have  this  money!"  cried  Lady  Char- 
lotte, amazed  and  indignant.  "Why!"  she  roared,  "it's  MY 
money ! ' ' 

In  that  instant  the  tenets  of  socialism,  after  a  siege  lasting 
a  quarter  of  a  century,  took  complete  possession  of  Oswald's 
mind.  In  that  same  instant  she  perceived  it.  "Any  one  can 
see  you're  a  Liberal  and  a  Socialist  yourself,"  she  cried. 
' '  You  'd  shake  hands  with  Lloyd  George  tomorrow.  Yes,  you 

would.  Why  poor  foolish  Vincent  made  you  trustee ! 

He  might  have  known !  You  a  sailor !  A  faddy  invalid  !• 
Mad  on  blacks.  I  suppose  you  'd  give  your  precious  Baganda 
Home  Rule  next !  And  him  always  so  sound  on  the  treat- 
ment of  the  natives !  Why !  he  kicked  a  real  judge — a  native 
judge — Inner  Temple  and  all  the  rest  of  it — out  of  his  rail- 
way compartment.  Kicked  him.  Bustled  him  out  neck  and 


428  JOAN  AND  PETER 

crop.  Awayed  with  him!  Oh,  if  he  could  see  you  now! 
Insulting  me!  Standing  up  for  all  these  people,  blacks, 
Irishmen,  strikers,  anything.  Sneering  at  the  dear  old  Union 
Jack  they  want  to  tear  to  pieces." 

"Well,"  said  Oswald  as  she  paused  to  take  breath. 
" You've  got  yourself  into  this  mess  and  you  must  get  along 
now  till  next  quarter  day  as  well  as  you  can.  I  can't  help 
you  and  you  don't  deserve  to  be  helped." 

"You'll  not  let  me  spend  my  own  money?" 

"You've  fired  off  all  the  money  you're  entitled  to.  You'll 
probably  kill  a  constable — or  some  decent  little  soldier  boy 
from  Devon  or  Kent.  .  .  .  Good  God!  Have  you  no  imag- 
ination? ..." 

It  was  the  most  rankling  encounter  he  had  ever  had  with 
her.  Either  he  was  losing  tolerance  for  her  or  she  was  indeed 
becoming  more  noisy  and  ferocious.  She  haunted  his 
thoughts  for  a  long  time,  and  his  thoughts  of  her,  so  intricate 
is  our  human  composition,  were  all  mixed  up  with  sympathy 
and  remorse  for  the  petty  cash  troubles  in  which  he  had  left 
her.  .  .  . 

But  what  a  pampered,  evil  soul  she  had  always  been! 
Never  in  all  her  life  had  she  made  or  grown  or  got  one  single 
good  thing  for  mankind.  She  had  lived  in  great  expensive 
houses,  used  up  the  labour  of  innumerable  people,  bullied 
servants,  insulted  poor  people,  made  mischief.  She  was  like 
some  gross  pet  idol  that  mankind  out  of  whim  kept  for  the 
sake  of  its  sheer  useless  ugliness.  He  found  himself  esti- 
mating the  weight  of  food  and  the  tanks  of  drink  she  must 
have  consumed,  the  carcases  of  oxen  and  sheep,  the  cartloads 
of  potatoes,  the  pyramids  of  wine  bottles  and  stout  bottles 
she  had  emptied.  And  she  had  no  inkling  of  gratitude  to  the 
careless  acquiescent  fellow-creatures  who  had  suffered  her  so 
long  and  so  abundantly.  At  the  merest  breath  upon  her 
clumsy  intolerable  dignity  she  clamoured  for  violence  and 
cruelty  and  killing,  and  would  not  be  appeased.  An  old 
idol!  And  she  was  only  one  of  a  whole  class  of  truculent, 
illiterate  harridans  who  were  stirring  up  bad  blood  in  half 
the  great  houses  of  London,  and  hurrying  Britain  on  to  an 
Irish  civil  war.  No!  She  wasn't  as  funny  as  she  seemed. 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         429 

Not  nearly  so  funny.  She  was  too  like  too  many  people  for 
that.  Too  like  most  people? 

Did  that  go  too  far  ? 

After  all  there  was  a  will  for  good  in  men ;  even  this  weary 
Irish  business  had  not  been  merely  a  conflict  of  fixed  ideas, 
there  had  been,  too,  real  efforts  on  the  part  of  countless  people 
to  get  the  tangle  straightened  out.  There  were  creative 
forces  at  work  in  men — even  in  Ireland.  And  also  there 
was  youth. 

His  thoughts  came  back  to  the  figure  of  Peter,  standing 
on  the  head  of  Howth  and  calling  for  a  new  world. 

"I'll  pit  my  Peter,"  he  said,  "against  all  the  Aunt  Char- 
lottes in  creation.  ...  In  the  long  run,  that  is. ' ' 

He  was  blind — was  not  all  Europe  blind? — to  the  vast 
disaster  that  hung  over  him  and  his  and  the  whole  world,  to 
the  accumulated  instability  of  the  outworn  social  and  political 
facade  that  now  tottered  to  a  crash.  Massacre,  famine,  social 
confusion,  world-wide  destruction,  long  years  of  death  and 
torment  were  close  at  hand ;  the  thinnest  curtain  of  time,  a 
mere  month  of  blue  days  now,  hung  between  him  and  the 
thunderous  overture  of  the  world  disaster. 

"I  pit  my  Peter,"  he  repeated,  "against  all  the  Aunt 
Charlottes  in  creation." 


§  10 

All  novels  that  run  through  the  years  of  the  great  war  must 
needs  be  political  novels  and  fragments  of  history.  In 
August,  1914,  that  detachment  of  human  lives  from  history, 
that  pretty  picaresque  disorder  of  experiences,  that  existence 
like  a  fair  with  ten  thousand  different  booths,  which  had 
gone  on  for  thousands  of  years,  came  to  an  end.  We  were 
all  brought  into  a  common  drama.  Something  had  happened 
so  loud  and  insistent  that  all  lives  were  focused  upon  it;  it 
became  a  leading  factor  in  every  life,  the  plot  of  every  story, 
the  form  of  all  our  thoughts.  It  so  thrust  itself  upon  man- 
kind that  the  very  children  in  the  schools  about  the  world 
asked  "why  has  this  thing  happened?"  and  could  not  live 


430  JOAN  AND  PETER 

on  without  some  answer.  The  Great  War  summoned  all 
human  beings  to  become  political  animals,  time  would  brook 
no  further  evasion.  August,  1914,  was  the  end  of  adventure 
and  mental  fragmentation  for  the  species ;  it  was  the  polar- 
ization of  mankind. 

Other  books  have  told,  innumerable  books  that  have  yet 
to  come  will  tell,  of  the  rushing  together  of  events  that  cul- 
minated in  the  breach  of  the  Belgian  frontier  by  the  German 
hosts.  Our  story  has  to  tell  only  of  how  that  crisis  took  to 
itself  and  finished  and  crowned  the  education  of  these  three 
people  with  whom  we  are  concerned.  Of  the  three,  Oswald 
and  Joan  spent  nearly  the  whole  of  July  at  Pelham  Ford. 
Peter  came  down  from  Cambridge  for  a  day  or  so  and  then, 
after  two  or  three  days  in  London  for  which  he  did  not 
clearly  account,  he  went  off  to  the  Bernese  Oberland  to  climb 
with  a  party  of  three  other  Trinity  men.  There  was  a  vague 
but  attractive  project  at  the  back  of  his  mind,  which  he  did 
not  confide  to  Oswald  or  Joan,  of  going  on  afterwards  into 
north  Italy  to  a  little  party  of  four  or  five  choice  spirits 
which  Hetty  was  to  organize.  They  could  meet  on  the  other 
side  of  the  Simplon.  Perhaps  they  would  push  on  into 
Venezia.  They  would  go  for  long  tramps  amidst  sweet 
chestnut  trees  and  ripening  grapes,  they  would  stay  in  the 
vast,  roomy,  forgotten  inns  of  sleepy  towns  whose  very  stables 
are  triumphs  of  architecture,  they  would  bathe  amidst  the 
sunlit  rocks  of  quiet  lakes.  Wherever  they  went  in  that  land 
the  snow  and  blue  of  the  distant  Alps  would  sustain  the  sweet 
landscape  as  music  sustains  a  song. 

Hetty  had  made  it  all  fantastically  desirable.  She  had 
invented  it  and  woven  details  about  it  one  afternoon  in  her 
studio.  She  knew  north  Italy  very  well ;  it  was  not  the  first 
amusing  journey  in  that  soft,  delicious  land  that  she  had 
contrived.  Peter  was  tremendously  excited  to  think  of  the 
bright  possibilities  of  such  an  adventure,  and  yet  withal 
there  was  a  queer  countervailing  feeling  gnawing  amidst  his 
lusty  anticipations.  Great  fun  it  would  be,  tremendous  fun, 
with  a  little  spice  of  sin  in  it,  and  why  not?  Only  somehow 
he  had  a  queer  unreasonable  feeling  that  Joan  ought  to  share 
his  holidays.  Old  Joan  who  looked  at  him  with  eyes  that 
held  a  shadow  of  sorrow ;  who  made  him  feel  that  she  knew 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    431 

more  than  she  could  possibly  know.  He  wished  Joan,  too, 
had  some  spree  in  contemplation — not  of  course  quite  the 
same  sort  of  spree.  A  decent  girl's  sort  of  spree.  Just  the 
tramp  part.  He  wished  he  could  tell  Joan  of  what  was  in 
hand,  that  there  wasn't  this  queer  embarrassment  between 
them.  Joan  had  her  car  of  course.  .  .  . 

Oswald  had  recently  bought  Joan  a  pretty  little  ten-horse- 
power Singer  car,  a  two-seater,  in  which  she  was  to  run 
about  the  country  at  her  own  free  will.  It  was  one  of  several 
attempts  he  had  recently  made  to  brighten  life  for  Joan. 
He  was  beginning  to  watch  her  very  closely;  he  did  not 
clearly  understand  the  thoughts  and  imaginations  that  made 
her  so  grave  and  feverish  at  times,  but  he  knew  that  she  was 
troubled.  The  girl's  family  resemblance  to  his  Dolly  had 
caught  his  mind.  He  thought  she  was  more  like  Dolly  than 
she  was  because  her  image  constantly  before  him  was  steadily 
replacing  Dolly's  in  his  mind.  And  he  liked  very  much  to 
sit  beside  her  and  watch  her  drive.  At  five-and-forty  miles 
an  hour  her  serene  profile  was  divine.  She  had  a  good  me- 
chanical intelligence  and  her  nerve  was  perfect;  the  little  car 
lived  in  her  hands  and  had  the  precision  of  movement  of  an 
animal. 

They  ran  across  country  to  Warwick  and  Stratford-on- 
Avon,  and  slept  the  night  in  Warwick;  they  went  to  New 
market  and  round  to  Chelmsford  and  Dovercourt,  which  was 
also  an  over-night  excursion.  These  were  their  longer  expe- 
ditions. They  made  afternoon  runs  to  St.  Albans,  Hitchin, 
Baldock,  Bedford,  Stevenage  and  Royston.  Almost  every 
fine  day  they  made  some  trip.  While  she  drove  or  while  they 
walked  about  some  unfamiliar  town  the  cloud  seemed  to  lift 
from  Joan's  mind,  she  became  as  fresh  and  bright  as  a  child. 
And  she  talked  more  and  more  freely  to  Oswald.  She  talked 
more  abundantly  than  Peter  and  much  less  about  ideas. 
She  talked  rather  of  scenery  and  customs  and  atmospheres. 
She  seemed  to  have  a  far  more  concrete  imagination  than 
Peter,  to  accept  the  thing  that  was  with  none  of  his  reluc- 
tance. She  would  get  books  about  Spain,  about  the  South 
Sea  Islands,  about  China,  big  books  of  travel  and  description, 
from  the  London  Library,  and  so  assimilate  them  that  she 
seemed  to  be  living  imaginatively  for  days  together  in  these 


432  JOAN  AND  PETER 

alien  atmospheres.  She  wanted  to  know  about  Uganda.  She 
was  curious  about  the  native  King.  There  were  times  when 
Oswald  was  reminded  of  some  hungry  and  impatient  guest 
in  a  restaurant  reading  over  an  over-crowded  and  perplexing 
menu. 

She  did  not  read  many  plays  or  novels  nor  any  poetry. 
She  mentioned  casually  one  day  to  Oswald  that  such  reading 
either  bored  her  or  disturbed  her.  She  read  a  certain  amount 
of  philosophy,  but  manifestly  now  as  a  task.  And  she  was 
incessantly  restless.  She  had  no  mother  nor  sisters,  no 
feminine  social  world  about  her;  she  suffered  from  a  com- 
plete lack  of  all  those  distracting  and  pacifying  routines  and 
all  those  restraints  of  habit  and  association  that  control  the 
lives  of  more  normally  placed  girls.  Her  thoughts,  stimu- 
lated by  her  uncontrolled  reading,  ran  wild.  One  morning 
she  was  up  an  hour  before  dawn,  and  let  herself  out  of  the 
house  and  walked  over  the  hills  nearly  to  Newport  before 
breakfast,  coming  back  with  skirts  and  shoes  wet  with  dew 
and  speckled  with  grass  seeds  and  little  burrs.  She  spent 
that  afternoon  asleep  in  the  hammock.  And  she  would  play 
fitfully  at  the  piano  or  the  pianola  after  dinner  and  then 
wander  out,  a  restless  white  sprite,  into  the  garden.  One 
night  early  in  the  month  she  persuaded  Oswald  to  go  for  a 
long  moonlight  walk  with  her  along  the  road  to  Ware. 

There  was  a  touch  of  dream  quality  in  that  walk  for  both 
of  them.  They  had  never  been  together  in  moonlight  before. 
She  ceased  to  be  Joan  and  became  at  once  something  very 
strange  and  wonderful  and  very  intimate,  a  magic  phantom 
of  womanhood,  a  creature  no  longer  of  flesh  and  blood  but  of 
pallor  and  shadow,  whose  hair  was  part  of  the  universal  dusk 
and  her  eyes  two  stars.  And  he,  too,  walking  along  and  some- 
times talking  as  if  he  talked  to  the  lonely  sky,  and  sometimes 
looking  down  out  of  the  dimness  closely  at  her,  he  had  lost 
his  age  and  his  scars  and  become  the  utmost  dignity  of  a  man. 
They  walked  sometimes  on  a  road  of  misty  brightness  and 
sometimes  through  deep  pools  of  shadow  and  sometimes 
amidst  the  black  bars  and  lace  cast  by  tree  stems  and 
tree  branches,  and  she  made  him  talk  of  the  vast  spaces 
of  Africa  and  the  long  trails  through  reed  and  forest,  and 
of  great  animals  standing  still  an,d  invisible  close  at  hand, 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    433 

hidden  by  the  trickery  of  their  colourings,  and  how  he  had 
gone  all  alone  into  the  villages  of  savage  people  who  had 
never  before  set  eyes  on  a  European.  And  she  talked  with  a 
whisper  and  sigh  in  her  voice  of  how  she,  too,  would  like  to 
go  into  wild  and  remote  lands — ''if  I  could  go  off  with  a  man 
like  you."  And  it  seemed  to  him  for  a  time  that  this  sweet 
voice  beside  him  was  not  truly  Joan's  but  another's,  and  that 
he  walked  once  more  with  the  dearest  wish  he  had  ever 
wished  in  his  life. 

He  talked  to  her  of  moonlight  and  starlight  in  the  tropics, 
of  a  wonderful  pale  incandescence  that  shines  out  above  the 
grave  of  the  sunset  when  the  day  has  gone,  of  fireflies  and 
of  phosphorescent  seas,  and  of  the  distant  sounds  of  drum- 
ming and  chanting  and  the  remote  blaze  of  native  bonfires 
seen  through  black  tree  stems  in  the  night.  He  talked,  too, 
of  the  howling  of  beasts  at  night,  and  of  the  sudden  roaring 
of  lions,  and  at  that  she  drew  closer  to  him. 

When  at  last  it  was  time  for  her  to  turn  she  did  not  want 
to  turn.  "I  have  been  happy,"  she  said.  "I  have  been 
happy.  Let  us  go  on.  Why  should  we  go  back  ? ' ' 

As  if  she  was  not  always  happy.  She  pulled  at  his  arm 
like  a  child.  .  .  . 

And  as  they  came  home  she  came  close  to  him,  and  for  long 
spaces  they  said  not  a  word  to  one  another. 

But  at  the  water  splash  in  the  village  she  had  a  queer 
impulse.  The  water  splash  appeared  ahead  of  them,  an 
incessant  tumult  of  silver  in  which  were  set  jewels  of  utter 
blackness  and  shining  diamonds.  She  looked  and  tugged 
him  by  the  arm. 

"Let  us  walk  through  the  water,  dear  Nobby!"  she  said. 
"I  want  to  feel  it  about  my  feet.  Do!  Do!  Do!  It  will 
hardly  cover  our  shoes.  ..." 

A  queer  impulse  that  was  of  hers  but,  what  was  queerer,  it 
found  the  completest  response  in  him.  "All  right,"  he  said, 
as  though  this  was  the  most  commonplace  suggestion  possible ; 
and  very  gravely,  and  as  if  it  was  some  sort  of  rite,  he  let  her 
lead  him  through  the  water.  They  were  indeed  both  very 
grave.  .  .  . 

They  walked  up  to  the  house  in  silence.  .  .  . 

"Good  night,  Nobby  dear,"  said  Joan,  leaning  suddenly 


434  JOAN  AND  PETER 

over  by  the  newel  of  the  stairs,  and  kissed  him,  as  the  moon- 
light kisses,  a  kiss  as  soft  and  cool  as  ever  awakened  Endy- 
mion.  .  .  . 

Life  was  at  high  tide  in  Joan  that  July,  and  everything  in 
her  was  straining  at  its  anchors.  All  her  being  was  flooded 
with  the  emotional  intimations  that  she  was  a  woman,  that 
she  had  to  be  beautiful  and  hasten  to  meet  exquisite  and  pro- 
foundly significant  experiences;  none  of  her  instincts  told 
her  that  the  affairs  of  the  world  drew  to  an  issue  that  would 
maim  and  kill  half  the  youths  she  knew  and  torment  and 
alter  her  own  and  every  life  about  her.  She  was  haunted 
and  distressed  day  and  night — for  the  trouble  got  into  her 
dreams — by  Peter's  evident  love-making  with  Hetty  and 
Huntley 's  watchful  eyes,  and  she  saw  nothing  of  the  red  eyes 
of  war  and  the  blood-lust  that  craved  for  all  her  generation. 
Peter  was  making  love — making  love  to  Hetty.  Peter  was 
making  love  to  Hetty.  And  Joan  was  left  at  home  in  a  fever 
of  desertion.  Her  brotherhood  with  Peter  which  had  been 
perhaps  the  greatest  fact  of  her  girlhood  was  breaking  down 
under  the  exasperation  of  their  separation  and  her  jealousy, 
and  Huntley  was  steadily  and  persistently  invading  her 
imagination.  .  .  . 

Women  and  men  alike  are  love-hungry  creatures;  women 
even  more  so  than  men.  It  is  not  beauty  nor  strength  nor 
goodness  that  hearts  go  to  so  much  as  attention.  To  know 
that  another  human  being  thinks  of  us,  esteems  us  above 
all  our  secret  estimates,  has  a  steadfast  and  consuming  need 
of  us,  is  the  supreme  reassurance  of  life.  And  when  women's 
hearts  are  distressed  by  vague  passions  and  a  friendless  in- 
security they  will  go  out  very  readily  even  to  a  cripple  who 
watches  and  waits. 

Huntley  was  one  of  those  men  for  whom  women  are  the 
sole  interest  in  life.  If  he  had  been  obliged  to  master  a 
mathematical  problem  he  would  have  thought  he  struggled 
with  a  Muse  and  so  achieved  it.  He  watched  them  and  way- 
laid them  for  small  and  great  occasions.  He  understood  com- 
pletely these  states  of  wild  impatience  that  possess  the  fem- 
inine mind.  He  had  no  brotherliness  nor  fatherliness  in  his 
composition:  his  sole  conception  of  this  trouble  of  the  un- 
mated  was  of  an  opportunity  for  himself.  A  little  patience, 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    435 

a  little  thought — and  it  was  very  delightful  thought,  a  little 
pleasant  skill,  and  all  this  vague  urgency  would  become  a  gift 
for  him. 

But  never  before  had  Huntley  met  any  one  so  fresh  and 
youthfully  beautiful  as  Joan.  There  were  times  when  he 
could  doubt  whether  he  was  the  magnetizer  or  the  magnetized. 
He  had  kissed  her  but  he  was  not  sure  that  she  had  kissed 
him.  Some  day  she  should  kiss  him  of  her  own  free  will. 
He  thought  now  almost  continuously  of  Joan.  The  only 
work  he  could  get  on  with  was  a  novel  into  which  he  put 
things  he  had  imagined  about  Joan.  He  wrote  her  long  let- 
ters and  planned  for  days  to  get  an  hour's  conversation  with 
her.  And  he  would  go  for  long  walks  and  spend  all  the 
time  composing  letters  or  scheming  dramatic  conversations 
that  never  would  happen  in  reality  because  Joan  missed  all 
her  cues. 

It  was  rather  by  instinct  than  by  any  set  scheme  that  he 
did  his  utmost  to  convert  her  vague  unrest  into  a  discontent 
with  all  her  circumstances,  to  shape  her  thoughts  to  the  idea 
that  her  present  life  was  a  prison-house  of  which  he  held 
the  key  of  escape.  He  suggested  in  a  score  of  different  ways 
to  her  mind  that  outside  her  present  prison  was  a  wonderland 
of  beauty  and  excitement.  He  was  clever  enough  to  catch 
from  her  talk  her  love  of  the  open,  of  fresh  air  and  sunlight. 
He  had  more  than  a  suspicion  of  Hetty  Reinhart's  plans; 
he  conveyed  them  by  shadowy  hints.  Why  should  not  Joan 
too  defy  convention?  She  could  tell  Oswald  a  story  of  a 
projected  walk  with  some  other  girl  at  Cambridge,  and  slip 
away  to  Huntley.  They  had  always  been  the  best  of  com- 
panions. Why  shouldn't  they  take  a  holiday  together? 

And  why  not  ? 

What  was  there  to  fear?  Couldn't  she  trust  Huntley? 
Couldn't  she  trust  herself? 

To  which  something  deep  in  Joan's  composition  replied 
that  this  was  but  playing  with  passion  and  romance,  and  she 
wanted  passion  and  romance.  She  wanted  a  reality — unen- 
durably.  And  it  was  clear  as  day  to  her  that  she  did  not 
want  passion  and  romance  with  Huntley.  He  was  a  strange 
being  to  her  really,  not  differing  as  man  does  from  woman 
but  as  dog  does  from  cat:  hidden  deep  down  perhaps  was 


436  JOAN  AND  PETER 

some  mysterious  difference  of  race ;  he  could  amuse  her  and 
interest  her  because  he  was  queer  and  unexpected,  but  he  was 
not  of  her  kind.  Like  to  like  was  the  way  of  the  Sydenham 
blood.  lie  offered  and  pointed  to  all  that  seemed  to  her 
necessary  to  make  life  right  and  to  end  this  aching  suspense 
— except  that  he  was  a  stranger.  .  .  . 

The  long  sunny  days  of  June  dragged  by.  Suppose  after 
all  she  were  to  slip  away  to  Huntley.  It  would  be  a  spree, 
it  would  be  an  excitement.  Did  he  matter  so  much  after 
all?  .  .  . 

Peter  sent  a  postcard  and  said  he  thought  he  would  go  on 
"with  some  people  into  Italy." 

She  had  known — all  along — that  that  was  coming. 

She  went  out  the  night  after  that  postcard  came  into  the 
garden  alone.  It  was  a  still  and  sultry  evening,  and  she 
stifled  even  in  the  open  air.  She  wanted  to  go  up  into  the 
arbour  and  to  sit  there  and  think.  She  could  not  understand 
the  quiver  of  anger  that  ran  through  her  being  like  the 
shiver  of  the  current  on  the  surface  of  a  stream.  All  the 
trees  and  bushes  about  her  were  dark  and  shapeless  lumps 
of  blackness  and  as  she  went  up  the  path  she  trod  on  two 
snails. 

"Damn  them!"  she  said  at  the  second  scrunch.  "Phew! 
What  a  night.  Full  of  things  that  crawl  about  in  the  dark- 
ness. Full  of  beastly  things.  ..." 

A  little  owl  mewed  and  mocked  wickedly  among  the  trees. 

There  was  no  view  out  of  the  black  arbour,  only  the 
sense  of  a  darkened  world.  A  thin  ineffectual  moon  crescent 
was  sinking  westward,  and  here  and  there  were  spiritless 
stars.  A  strange,  huge  shape  of  clouds,  a  hooded  figure  of 
the  profoundest  blue,  brooded  in  a  sky  of  luminous  pale  yel- 
low over  the  land  to  the  south  and  east,  and  along  the  undor 
fringe  of  its  skirts  ever  and  again  there  ran  a  flicker  of 
summer  lightning.  "And  I  am  to  live  here!  I  am  to  live 
here  while  life  runs  by  me,"  she  said. 

She  would  go  to  Huntley.  No  brother  and  sister  business 
though !  She  would  go  to  Huntley  and  end  all  this  torment. 

But  she  couldn't!  .  .  . 

"Why  have  I  no  will?"  she  cried  harshly. 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR    437 

She  did  not  love  Huntley.  That  did  not  matter.  She 
would  make  herself  love  Huntley.  .  .  . 

She  went  out  upon  the  terrace  and  stood  very  still,  looking 
down  upon  the  house  and  thinking  hard. 

Could  she  love  no  one?  If  so,  then  it  might  as  well  be 
Huntley  she  went  to  as  any  one?  All  these  boys,  Troop, 
Winterbaum,  Wilmington — they  were  nothing  to  her.  But 
she  wanted  to  live.  Was  it  perhaps  that  she  did  love  some 
one — who  stood,  invisible  and  unregarded,  possessing  her 
heart  ? 

Her  mind  halted  on  that  for  a  time  and  then  seemed  to 
force  itself  along  a  certain  line  that  lay  before  it.  Did  she 
love  Oswald  ?  She  did.  More  than  any  of  them — far  more. 
The  other  night  most  certainly  she  had  been  in  love  with  him. 
WThen  he  walked  through  the  water  with  her — absurdly 

grave !  She  could  have  flung  her  arms  about  him  then. 

She  could  have  clung  to  him  and  kissed  him.  Of  course  she 
must  be  in  love  with  him.  .  .  .  But  he  was  not  in  love  with 
her!  .  .  .  And  yet  that  moonlit  evening  it  seemed ? 

Suppose  it  were  Oswald  and  not  Huntley  who  beckoned. 

Love  for  Huntley — love  him  where  you  would — though 
you  loved  him  in  the  most  beautiful  scenery  in  the  world — 
would  still  be  something  vulgar,  still  be  this  dirty  love  of 
the  studios,  still  a  trite  disobedience,  a  stolen  satisfaction, 
after  the  fashion  of  the  Reinhart  affair.  But  Oswald  was  a 
great  man,  a  kind  and  noble  giant,  who  told  no  lies,  who 
played  no  tricks.  .  .  . 

If  he  were  to  love  one !  .  .  . 

She  stood  upon  the  terrace  looking  down  upon  the  lit 
house,  trembling  with  this  thought  that  she  loved  Oswald  and 
holding  fast  to  it — for  fear  of  another  thought  that  she  dared 
not  think,  that  lay  dark  and  waiting  outside  her  conscious- 
ness, a  poor  exile  thought,  utterly  forbidden. 


§  11 

Joan  stood  in  the  darkness  on  the  turf  outside  Oswald's 
open  window,  and  watched  him. 


438  JOAN  AND  PETER 

He  was  so  deep  in  thought  that  he  had  not  noted  the 
soft  sounds  of  her  approach.  The  only  light  in  the  room 
was  his  study  lamp,  and  his  face  was  in  shadow  while  his 
hands  rested  on  the  open  Atlas  in  front  of  him  and  were 
brightly  lit.  They  were  rather  sturdy  white  hands  with 
broad  thumbs,  exactly  like  Peter's.  Presently  he  stirred 
and  pulled  the  Atlas  towards  him,  and  turned  the  page 
over  to  another  map.  The  fingers  of  his  left  hand  drummed 
on  the  desk. 

He  looked  up  abruptly,  and  she  came  to  the  window  and 
leant  forward  into  the  room,  with  her  arms  folded  on  the 
sill. 

'You're  as  still  as  the  night,  Joan,"  he  said. 
'There's  thunder  brewing." 
'There's  war  brewing,  Joan." 
'Why  do  you  sit  poring  over  that  map?" 
'Because   there    are    various    people    called    Croats    and 
Slovenes  and  Serbs  and  they  are  beginning  to  think  they  are 
one  people  and  ought  to  behave  as  one  people,  and  some  of 
them  are  independent  and  some  are  under  the  Austrians  and 
some  are  under  the  Italians." 

"What  has  that  got  to  do  with  us?"  said  Joan. 

She  followed  her  question  up  with  another.  "  Is  it  a  fresh 
Balkan  war?" 

' '  Something  bigger  than  that, ' '  said  Oswald.  ' '  Something 
very  much  bigger — unless  we  are  careful." 

His  tone  was  so  grave  that  Joan  caught  something  of  his 
gravity.  She  stepped  in  through  the  window.  "Where  are 
all  these  people?"  she  said.  She  thought  it  was  character- 
istic of  him  to  trouble  about  these  distant  races  and  their  en- 
tanglements. But  she  wished  he  could  have  a  keener  sense  of 
the  perplexities  that  came  nearer  him.  She  came  and  leant 
over  him  while  he  explained  the  political  riddle  of  Austria 
and  Eastern  Europe  to  her.  .  .  . 

"We  are  too  busy  with  the  Irish  trouble,"  he  said.  "I  am 
afraid  of  Germany.  If  that  fool  Carson  and  these  Pank- 
hurst  people  had  been  paid  to  distract  our  minds  from  what 
is  happening,  they  could  not  do  the  work  better.  Big  things 
are  happening — oh!  big  things." 

She  tried  to  feel  their  bigness.     But  to  her  all  such  political 


THE  WORLD  OX  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         439 

talk  was  still  as  unreal  as  things  one  reads  about  in  histories, 
something  to  do  with  maps  and  dates,  something  you  can 
"get  up"  and  pass  examinations  in,  but  nothing  that  touches 
the  warm  realities  of  personal  life  and  beauty.  Yet  it 
pleased  her  to  think  that  this  Oswald  she  loved  could  reach 
up  to  these  things,  so  that  he  partook  of  the  nature  of  the 
great  beings  who  cared  for  them  like  Gladstone  or  Lincoln, 
and  was  not  simply  a  limited  real  person  like  Troop  or  Wil- 
mington or  Peter.  (He  was  really  like  a  great  Peter,  like 
what  Peter  ought  to  be.)  He  seemed  preoccupied  as  if  he  did 
not  feel  how  close  she  was  about  him,  how  close  her  beauty 
came  to  him.  She  sat  now  on  the  arm  of  his  chair  behind  him, 
with  her  face  over  his  shoulder.  Her  body  touched  his  shoul- 
ders, by  imperceptible  degrees  she  brought  her  cheek  against 
his  crisp  hair,  where  it  pressed  no  heavier  than  a  shadow. 

She  had  no  suspicion  how  vividly  he  was  aware  of  her 
nearness. 

As  he  discoursed  to  her  upon  the  text  of  the  maps  before 
them,  a  deep  undercurrent  of  memories  and  feelings  of 
quite  a  different  quality  ran  contrariwise  through  his  mind. 
"We  are  getting  nearer  than  we  have  ever  been  to  a  big 
European  war,  a  big  break-up !  People  do  not  understand, 
do  not  begin  to  dream  of  the  smash-up  that  that  would  be. 
There  is  scarcely  a  country  that  may  not  be  drawn  in." 

So  he  spoke.  And  below  that  level  of  thought  he  was  ir- 
ritated to  feel  that  such  thought  could  not  wholly  possess 
him.  Far  more  real  to  him  were  the  vague  suggestions  of 
love  and  the  summer  night  and  the  dusky  nearness  of  this 
Joan,  this  phantom  of  Dolly,  for  more  and  more  were  Joan 
and  Dolly  blending  together  in  his  emotional  life,  this  dear- 
ness  and  sweetness  that  defied  all  reasoning  and  explanation. 
And  cutting  across  both  these  streams  of  thought  and  feel- 
ing came  a  third  stream  of  thought.  Joan's  intonations  in 
every  word  she  spoke  betrayed  her  indifference  to  the  great 
net  of  political  forces  in  which  the  world  struggled.  She  was 
no  more  deeply  interested  than  if  he  had  been  discussing 
some  problem  at  chess  or  some  mathematical  point.  She  was 
not  deeply  interested  and  he  was  not  completely  interested, 
and  yet  this  question  that  was  slipping  its  hold  on  their  at- 
tention might  involve  the  lives  and  welfare  of  millions.  .  .  . 


440  JOAN  AND  PETER 

He  struggled  with  his  conception  of  a  world  being  hauled 
to  its  destruction  in  a  net  of  vaguely  apprehended  ideas,  of 
ordinary  life  being  shattered  not  by  the  strength  but  by  the 
unattractive  feebleness  of  its  political  imaginings.  "People 
do  not  understand,"  he  repeated,  trying  to  make  this  thing 
real  to  himself.  "All  Europe  is  in  danger." 

He  turned  upon  her  with  a  betrayal  of  irritation  in  his 
voice.  "You  think  all  this  matters  nothing  to  us,"  he  said. 
"But  it  does.  If  Austria  makes  war  in  Serbia,  Russia  will 
come  in.  If  Russia  comes  in,  France  comes  in.  That  brings 
in  Germany.  We  can 't  see  France  beaten  again.  We  can 't 
have  that." 

But  Joan  had  still  the  child 's  belief  that  somewhere,  some- 
how, behind  all  the  ostensible  things  of  the  world,  wise 
adults  in  its  interests  have  the  affairs  of  mankind  under  con- 
trol. "They  won't  let  things  go  as  far  as  that,'1  she  said. 

Oswald  reflected  upon  that.  How  sure  this  creature  was 
of  her  world! 

"Until  Death  and  Judgment  come,  Joan,"  he  said,  "there 
is  neither  Death  nor  Judgment." 

That  saying  and  his  manner  of  saying  it  struck  hard  on 
her  mind.  Before  she  went  to  sleep  that  night  she  found 
herself  trying  to  imagine  what  war  was  really  like.  .  .  . 

And  next  day  she  was  thinking  of  war.  Would  Peter  per- 
haps have  to  be  a  soldier  if  there  was  a  real  great  war? 
Would  all  her  young  men  go  soldiering?  Would  Oswald  go? 
And  what  was  there  for  a  girl  to  do  in  war-time?  She 
hated  the  idea  of  nursing,  but  she  supposed  she  would  have  to 
nurse.  Far  rather  would  she  go  under  fire  and  rescue 
wounded  men.  Had  modern  war  no  use  for  a  Joan  of  Arc? 
.  .  .  She  sank  to  puerile  visions  of  a  girl  in  a  sort  of  Vivandi- 
ere  uniform  upholding  a  tattered  flag  under  a  heavy  fire. 
.  .  .  It  couldn't  last  very  long.  ...  It  would  be  exciting. 
.  .  .  But  all  this  was  nonsense;  there  would  be  no  war. 
There  would  be  a  conference  or  an  arbitration  or  something 
dull  of  that  sort,  and  all  this  stir  and  unrest  would  subside 
and  leave  things  again — as  they  had  been.  .  .  . 

Swiftly  and  steadfastly  now  the  world  was  setting  itself 
to  tear  up  all  the  scenery  of  Joan 's  world  and  to  smash  and 
burn  its  every  property.  If  it  had  not  been  for  the  sug- 


THE  WORLD  ON  THE  EVE  OF  WAR         441 

gestion  of  Oswald 's  deepening  preoccupation  one  may  doubt 
whether  Joan  would  have  heeded  the  huge  rush  of  events 
iu  Europe  until  the  moment  of  the  crash.  But  because  of 
him  she  was  drawn  into  the  excitement.  From  the  twenty- 
fifth  of  July,  which  was  the  day  when  the  news  of  the  Aus- 
trian ultimatum  to  Serbia  appeared  in  the  English  newspa- 
pers, through  the  swift  rush  of  eveiits  that  followed,  the  fail- 
ure of  the  Irish  Conference  at  Buckingham  Palace  to  arrive 
at  any  settlement  upon  the  Irish  question,  the  attempts  of 
Sir  Edward  Grey  to  arrest  the  march  of  events  in  Eastern 
Europe,  the  unchallenged  march  of  five  thousand  men  with 
machine-guns  through  Belfast,  the  shooting  upon  the  crowd 
in  Dublin  after  the  Howth  gun-running,  the  consequent  en- 
couragement of  Germany  and  Austria  to  persist  in  a  stiff 
course  with  Russia  because  of  the  apparent  inevitability  of 
civil  war  in  Ireland,  right  up  to  the  march  of  the  Germans 
into  Luxembourg  on  the  first  of  August,  Joan  followed 
with  an  interest  that  had  presently  swamped  her  egotistical 
eroticism  altogether. 

The  second  of  August  was  a  Sunday  and  brought  no  papers 
to  Pelham  Ford,  but  Joan  motored  to  Bishop's  Stortford 
to  get  an  Observer.  Monday  was  Bank  Holiday ;  the  belated 
morning  paper  brought  the  news  of  the  massacre  of  Belgian 
peasants  by  the  Germans  at  Vise.  The  Germans  were  pour- 
ing into  Belgium,  an  incredible  host  of  splendidly  armed 
men.  Tuesday  was  an  immense  suspense  for  Oswald  and 
Joan.  They  were  full  of  an  uncontrollable  indignation 
against  Germany.  They  thought  the  assault  on  Belgium  the 
most  evil  thing  that  had  ever  happened  in  history.  But  it 
seemed  as  though  the  Government  and  the  country  hesitated. 
The  Daily  News  came  to  hand  with  a  whole  page  advertise- 
ment in  great  letters  exhorting  England  not  to  go  to  war  for 
Belgium. 

"But  this  is  Shame!"  cried  Oswald.  "If  once  the  Ger- 
mans get  Paris !  It  is  Shame  and  Disaster!" 

The  postman  was  a  reservist  and  had  been  called  up. 
All  over  the  country  the  posts  were  much  disorganized.  It 
was  past  eleven  on  the  sunniest  of  Wednesdays  when  Joan, 
standing  restless  at  the  gates,  called  to  Oswald,  who  was 
fretfully  pacing  the  lawn,  that  the  papers  were  coming. 


442  JOAN  AND  PETER 

She  ran  down  the  road  to  intercept  the  postman,  and  came 
back  with  a  handful  of  letters  and  parcels.  Newspapers  were 
far  more  important  than  any  personal  letters  that  morning. 
She  gave  Oswald  the  newspaper  package  to  tear  open,  and 
snatched  up  The  Daily  News  as  it  fell  out  of  the  enveloping 
Times. 

There  was  a  crisp  rustling  of  the  two  papers. 

Oswald's  fear  of  his  country's  mental  apathy,  muddle- 
headedness,  levity,  and  absolute  incapacity  to  grasp  any 
great  situation  at  all,  had  become  monstrous  under  the 
stresses  of  these  anxious  days.  Up  to  the  end  he  feared 
some  politicians'  procrastination,  some  idiot  dishonesty  and 
betrayal,  weak  palterings  with  a  challenge  as  high  as  heaven, 
with  dangers  as  plain  as  daylight.  .  .  . 

"Thank  God!"  he  cried.     "It  is  War!" 


CHAPTER  THE  THIRTEENTH 

JOAN    AND   PETER   GRADUATE 
§    1 

SO  it  was,  with  a  shock  like  the  shock  of  an  unsuspected 
big  gun  tired  suddenly  within  a  hundred  yards  of  her, 
that  the  education  of  Joan  and  her  generation  turned 
about  and  entered  upon  a  new  and  tragic  phase.     Neces- 
sity had  grown  impatient  with  the  inertia  of  the  Universities 
and  the  evasions  of  politicians.     Mankind  must  learn  the 
duties  of  human  brotherhood  and  respect  for  the  human  ad- 
venture, or  waste  and  perish;  so  our  stern  teacher  has  de- 
creed.    If  in  peace  time  we  cannot  learn  and  choose  between 
those  alternatives,  then  through  war  we  must.     And  if  we 

will  in  no  manner  learn  our  lesson,  then .     The  rocks  are 

rich  with  the  traces  of  ineffective  creatures  that  the  Great  Ex- 
perimenter has  tried  and  thrown  aside.  .  .  . 

All  these  young  people  who  had  grown  up  without  any 
clear  aims  or  any  definite  sense  of  obligations,  found  them- 
selves confronted,  without  notice,  without  any  preparation, 
by  a  world  crisis  that  was  also  a  crisis  of  life  or  death,  of 
honour  or  dishonour  for  each  one  of  them.  They  had  most 
of  them  acquired  the  habit  of  regarding  the  teachers  and 
statesmen  and  authorities  set  up  over  their  lives  as  people 
rather  on  the  dull  side  of  things,  as  people  addicted  to 
muddling  and  disingenuousness  in  matters  of  detail;  but 
they  had  never  yet  suspected  the  terrific  insecurity  of  the 
whole  system — until  this  first  thunderous  crash  of  the  down- 
fall. Even  then  they  did  not  fully  realize  themselves  as  a 
generation  betrayed  to  violence  and  struggle  and  death.  All 
human  beings,  all  young  things,  are  born  with  a  conviction 
that  all  is  right  with  the  world.  There  is  mother  to  go  to 
and  father  to  go  to,  and  behind  them  the  Law;  for  most 
of  the  generation  that  came  before  Joan  and  Peter  the  delu- 

443 


444  JOAN  AND  PETER 

sion  of  a  great  safety  lasted  on  far  into  adult  life;  only 
slowly,  with  maturity,  came  the  knowledge  of  the  flimsiness 
of  all  these  protections  and  the  essential  daugerousness  of 
the  world.  But  for  this  particular  generation  the  disillusion- 
ment came  like  an  unexpected  blow  in  the  face.  They  were 
preparing  themselves  in  a  leisurely  and  critical  fashion  for 
the  large,  loose  prospect  of  unlimited  life,  and  then  abruptly 
the  world  dropped  its  mask.  That  pampered  and  undisci- 
plined generation  was  abruptly  challenged  to  be  heroic  be- 
yond all  the  precedents  of  mankind.  Their  safety,  their  free- 
dom ended,  their  leisure  ended.  The  first  few  days  of  Aug- 
ust, 1914,  in  Europe,  was  a  spectacle  of  old  men  planning 
and  evading,  lying  and  cheating,  most  of  them  so  scared  by 
what  they  were  doing  as  completely  to  have  lost  their  heads, 
and  of  youth  and  young  men  everywhere  being  swept  from 
a  million  various  employments,  from  a  million  divergent  in- 
terests and  purposes,  which  they  had  been  led  to  suppose  were 
the  proper  interests  and  purposes  of  life,  towards  the  great 
military  machines  that  were  destined  to  convert,  swiftly  and 
ruthlessly,  all  their  fresh  young  life  into  rags  and  blood  and 
rotting  flesh.  .  .  . 

But  at  first  the  young  had  no  clear  sense  of  the  witless 
futility  of  the  machine  that  was  to  crush  their  lives.  They 
did  not  understand  that  there  was  as  yet  no  conception  of  a 
world  order  anywhere  in  the  world.  They  had  taken  it  for 
granted  that  there  was  an  informal,  tacitly  understood  world 
order,  at  which  these  Germans — confound  them ! — had  sud- 
denly struck. 

Peter  and  his  friends  were  so  accustomed  to  jeer  at  the 
dignitaries  of  church  and  state  and  at  kings  and  politicians 
that  they  could  not  realize  that  such  dwarfish  and  comic  char- 
acters could  launch  disaster  upon  a  whole  world.  They 
sat  about  a  little  table  in  a  twilit  arbour  on  the  way  down 
from  Bel-Alp — Peter  was  to  leave  the  climbers  and  join  the 
Italian  party  at  Brigue — and  devoured  omelette  and  veal 
and  drank  Yvorne,  and  mocked  over  the  Swiss  newspapers. 

"Another  ultimatum!"  said  one  cheerful  youth.  "Hol- 
land will  get  it  next." 

"He's  squirting  ultimatums.  Like  a  hedgehog  throwing 
quills." 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      445 

"I  saw  him  in  Berlin,"  said  Peter.  "He  rushed  by  in  an 
automobile.  He  isn't  a  human  being.  He's  more  like  Mr. 
Toad  in  The  Wind  in  the  Willows.  .  .  . " 

"All  the  French  have  gone  home;  all  the  Germans,"  said 
Troop.  "I  suppose  we  ought  to  go." 

"I've  promised  to  go  to  Italy,"  said  Peter. 

"War  is  war,"  said  Troop,  and  stiffened  Peter's  resolution. 

"I'm  not  going  to  have  my  holidays  upset  by  a  theatrical 
ass  in  a  gilt  helmet,"  said  Peter. 

He  got  down  to  Brigue  next  day,  and  the  little  town  was 
bright  with  uniforms,  for  the  Swiss  were  mobilizing.  He 
saw  off  his  mountaineering  friends  in  the  evening  train  for 
Paris.  "You'd  better  come,"  said  Troop  gravely,  hanging 
out  of  the  train. 

Peter  shook  his  head.  His  was  none  of  your  conscript  na- 
tions. No.  .  .  . 

He  dined  alone;  Hetty  and  her  two  friends  were  coming 
up  from  Lausanne  next  day.  In  the  reading-room  he  found 
the  Times  with  the  first  news  of  the  invasion  of  Belgium. 
Several  of  the  villagers  of  Vise  had  turned  out  with  shot 
guns,  and  the  Germans  had  performed  an  exemplary  mas- 
sacre for  the  discouragement  of  franc-tireurs.  Indignation 
had  been  gathering  in  Peter  during  the  day.  He  swore 
aloud  and  flung  down  the  paper.  "Is  there  no  one  sane 
enough  to  assassinate  a  scoundrel  who  sets  things  loose  like 
this?"  he  said.  He  prowled  about  the  little  old  town  in  the 
moonlight,  full  of  black  rage  against  the  Kaiser.  He  felt 
he  must  go  back.  But  it  seemed  to  him  a  terrible  indignity 
that  he  should  have  to  interrupt  his  holiday  because  of  the 
ambition  of  a  monarch.  "Why  the  devil  can't  the  Ger- 
mans keep  him  on  his  chain?"  he  said,  and  then,  "Shoot- 
ing the  poor  devils — like  rabbits!" 

Hetty  and  her  friends  arrived  in  the  early  train  next  morn- 
ing, all  agog  about  the  war.  They  thought  it  a  tremendous 
lark.  They  were  not  to  get  out  at  Brigue,  it  was  arranged ; 
Peter  was  to  be  on  the  platform  with  his  rucksack  and  join 
them.  He  kept  the  appointment,  but  he  was  a  very  scowling 
Peter  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  Hetty  was  gentle  and  tremu- 
lous at  the  sight  of  him  in  her  best  style.  "This  train  is 
an  hour  late,"  said  Peter,  sitting  down  beside  her.  "That 


446  JOAN  AND  PETER 

accursed  fool  at  Potsdam  is  putting  all  our  Europe  out  of 
gear."  .  .  . 

For  three  days  he  was  dark,  preoccupied  company. 
"Somebody  ought  to  assassinate  him,"  he  said,  harping  on 
that  idea.  "Have  men  no  self-respect  at  all?" 

He  felt  he  ought  to  go  back  to  England,  and  the  feeling 
produced  a  bleak  clearness  in  his  mind.  It  was  soft  sunshine 
on  the  lake  of  Orta,  but  east  wind  in  Peter's  soul.  He 
disliked  Hetty's  friends  extremely;  he  had  never  met  them 
before;  they  were  a  vulgar  brace  of  sinners  he  thought, 
and  they  reflected  their  quality  upon  her.  The  war  they 
considered  was  no  concern  of  theirs ;  they  had  studio  minds. 
The  man  was  some  sort  of  painter,  middle-aged,  contemptu- 
ous, and  with  far  too  much  hair.  He  ought  to  have  been  past 
this  sort  of  spree.  The  girl  was  a  model  and  had  never  been 
in  Italy  before.  She  kept  saying,  "0,  the  sky!"  until  it 
jarred  intolerably.  The  days  are  notoriously  longer  on  the 
lake  of  Orta  than  anywhere  else  in  the  world;  from  ten 
o'clock  in  the  morning  to  lunch  time  is  about  as  long  as  a 
week's  imprisonment;  from  two  to  five  is  twice  that  length; 
from  five  onward  the  course  of  time  at  Orta  is  more  normal. 
Hetty  was  Hetty,  in  the  tradition  of  Cleopatra,  but  could 
Cleopatra  hold  a  young  man  whose  mind  was  possessed  by  one 
unquenchable  thought  that  he  had  been  grossly  insulted 
and  deranged  by  an  exasperating  potentate  at  Potsdam  who 
was  making  hay  of  his  entire  world,  and  that  he  had  to  go 
at  once  and  set  things  right,  and  that  it  was  disgraceful  not 
to  go? 

He  broached  these  ideas  to  Hetty  about  eleven  o'clock 
on  their  first  morning  upon  the  lake.  They  were  adrift 
in  a  big  tilted  boat  in  the  midst  of  a  still,  glassy  symmetry  of 
mountain-backed  scenery  and  mountain-backed  reflections, 
and  the  other  couple  was  far  away,  a  little  white  dot  at  the 
head  of  a  V  of  wake,  rowing  ambitiously  to  the  end  of  the 
lake. 

"You  can't  go,"  said  Hetty  promptly.  .  .  . 

"Hut  1  have  come  all  the  way  to  Italy  for  you!"  cried 
Hetty.  .  .  . 

This  was  a  perplexing  problem  for  the  honour  of  a  young 
man  of  one-and-twenty.  He  argued  the  case — weakly.  He 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      447 

had  an  audience  of  one,  a  very  compelling  one.  He  decided 
to  remain.  In  the  night  he  woke  up  and  thought  of  Troop. 
Old  Troop  must  be  in  England  by  now.  Perhaps  he  had 
already  enlisted.  Ever  since  their  school  days  he  and  Troop 
had  had  a  standing  dispute  upon  questions  of  morals  and 
duty.  There  was  something  dull  and  stiff  about  old  Troop 

that  drove  a  bright  antagonist  to  laxity,  but  after  all ? 

Troop  had  cut  oft'  clean  and  straight  to  his  duty.  .  .  .  Be- 
cause Troop  wasn't  entangled.  He  had  kept  clear  of  all  this 
love-making  business.  .  .  .  There  was  something  to  be  said 
for  Troop's  point  of  view  after  all.  .  .  . 

The  second  day  Peter  reopened  the  question  of  going  as 
they  sat  on  a  stone  seat  under  the  big,  dark  trees  on  the 
Sacro  Monte,  and  looked  out  under  the  drooping  boughs  upon 
the  lake,  and  Hetty  had  far  more  trouble  with  him.  He 
decided  he  could  not  leave  her.  But  he  spent  the  hours 
between  tea  and  dinner  in  reading  all  the  war  news  he  could 
find — translating  the  Italian  with  the  aid  of  a  small  conver- 
sation dictionary.  Something  had  happened  in  the  North 
Sea,  he  could  not  make  out  exactly  what  it  was,  but  the 
Germans  had  lost  a  ship  called  the  Konigin  Luise,  and  the 
British  a  battleship — was  it  a  battleship? — the  Amphion. 
Beastly  serious  that! — a  battleship.  There  was  something 
vague,  too,  about  a  fleet  encounter,  but  no  particulars.  It 
was  a  bore  getting  no  particulars.  Here  close  at  hand  in  the 
Mediterranean  there  had  been,  it  was  said,  a  naval  battle 
in  the  Straits  of  Messina  also;  the  Panther  was  sunk;  and 
the  Germans  had  had  a  great  defeat  at  Liege.  The  Brit- 
ish army  was  already  landing  in  France.  .  .  . 

Upon  his  second  decision  to  remain  Peter  reflected  pro- 
foundly that  night. 

The  standing  dispute  between  him  and  Troop  upon  the 
lightness  or  seriousness  of  things  sexual  returned  to  his 
mind.  Troop,  Peter  held,  regarded  all  these  things  with  a 
portentous  solemnity,  a  monstrous  sentimentality.  Peter, 
Troop  maintained,  regarded  them  with  a  dangerous  levity. 
Troop  declared  that  love,  "true  love,"  was,  next  to  "hon- 
our," the  most  tremendous  thing  in  life;  he  was  emphatic 
upon  "purity."  Peter  held  that  love  was  as  light  and  pleas- 
ant and  incidental  a  thing  as  sunshine.  You  said,  ' '  Here 's  a 


448  JOAN  AND  PETER 

jolly  person!"  just  as  you  said,  "Here's  a  pretty  flower!" 
There  had  been,  he  argued,  a  lot  of  barbaric  "Taboos"  in 
these  matters,  but  the  new  age  was  dropping  all  that.  He 
called  Troop's  idea  of  purity  "ceremonial  obsession."  Both 
talked  very  freely  of  "cleanness"  and  meant  very  different 
things:  Troop  chiefly  abstinence  and  Peter  baths.  Peter 
had  had  the  courage  of  his  opinions;  but  once  or  twice 
he  had  doubted  secretly  whether,  after  all,  there  weren't  de- 
filements beyond  the  reach  of  mere  physical  cleansing.  One 
dismissed  that  sort  of  thing  as  "reaction."  All  these  dis- 
putes were  revived  now  in  his  memory  in  the  light  of  this 
one  plain,  disconcerting  fact:  Troop  had  gone  straight  home 
to  enlist  and  he  himself  was  still  in  Italy.  Weakening  of 
moral  fibre  ?  Loss  of  moral  fibre  ? 

The  next  day,  in  the  boat,  Peter  reopened  the  question  of 
his  departure. 

"You  see,  Pletty,"  he  said,  "if  there  was  conscription  in 
England — I  shouldn't  feel  so  bound  to  go." 

"But  then  you  would  be  bound  to  go." 

"Well,  then  I  could  be  a  decent  deserter — for  love's  sake. 
But  when  your  country  leaves  it  to  you  to  come  back  or  not 
as  you  think  fit — then,  you  know,  you're  bound — in  hon- 
our." 

Hetty  dabbled  her  hand  over  the  side  of  the  boat.  "Oh — 
go!"  she  said. 

"Yes,"  said  Peter  over  the  oars,  and  as  if  ashamed,  "I 
must  go — I  must.  There  is  a  train  this  afternoon  which 
catches  the  express  at  Domo  d'Ossola." 

He  rowed  for  a  while.  Presently  he  stole  a  glance  at 
Hetty.  She  was  lying  quite  still  on  her  cushion  under  the 
tilt,  staring  at  the  distant  mountains,  with  tears  running 
down  her  set  face.  They  were  real  tears.  "Three  days," 
she  said  choking,  and  at  that  rolled  over  to  weep  noisily  upon 
her  arms. 

Peter  sat  over  his  oars  and  stared  helplessly  at  her  emo- 
tion. 

A  familiar  couplet  came  into  his  head,  and  remained  un- 
spoken because  of  its  striking  inappropriateness : 

"I   could   not   lovf  tli oo,  dear,   so   much, 
Loved  I  not  honour  more." 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      449 

Presently  Hetty  lay  still.  Then  she  sat  up  and  wiped  at 
a  tear-stained  face. 

"If  you  must  go,"  said  Hetty,  "you  must  go.  But  why 
you  didn't  go  from  Brigue !" 

That  problem  was  to  exercise  Peter's  mind  considerably 
in  the  extensive  reflections  of  the  next  few  days  and  nights. 

"And  1  have  to  stick  in  Italy  with  those  two  Bores !"  .  .  . 

But  the  easy  flexibility  of  Hetty 's  temperament  was  a  large 
part  of  her  charm. 

"I  suppose  you  ought  to  go,  Peter,"  she  said,  "really. 
I  had  no  business  to  try  and  keep  you.  But  I've  had  so 
little  of  you.  And  I  love  you. ' ' 

She  melted.  Peter  melted  in  sympathy.  But  he  was  much 
relieved.  .  .  . 

She  slipped  into  his  bedroom  to  help  him  pack  his  ruck- 
sack, and  she  went  with  him  to  the  station.  "1  wish  I  was  a 
man,  too,"  she  said.  "Then  I  would  come  with  you.  But 
wars  don't  last  for  ever,  Peter.  "We'll  come  back  here." 

She  watched  the  train  disappear  along  the  curve  above 
the  station  with  something  like  a  sense  of  desolation.  Then 
being  a  really  very  stout-hearted  young  woman,  she  turned 
about  and  went  down  to  the  telegraph  office  to  see  what 
could  be  done  to  salvage  her  rent  and  shattered  holiday. 

And  Peter,  because  of  these  things,  and  because  of  certain 
delays  at  Paris  and  Havre,  for  the  train  and  Channel  serv- 
ices were  getting  badly  disorganized,  got  to  England  six 
whole  days  later  than  Troop. 

§  2 

This  passion  of  indignation  against  Germany  in  which 
Peter  enlisted  was  the  prevailing  mood  of  England  during 
the  opening  months  of  the  war.  The  popular  mind  had 
seized  upon  the  idea  that  Europe  had  been  at  peace  and 
might  have  remained  at  peace  indefinitely  if  it  had  not  been 
for  the  high-handed  behaviour,  first  of  Austria  with  Serbia, 
and  then  of  Germany  with  Russia.  The  belief  that  on  the 
whole  Germany  had  prepared  for  and  sought  this  war  was  no 
doubt  correct,  and  the  spirit  of  the  whole  nation  rose  high 
and  fine  to  the  challenge.  But  that  did  not  so  completely 


450  JOAN  AND  PETER 

exhaust  the  moral  factors  in  the  case  as  most  English  people, 
including  Peter,  supposed  at  that  time. 

Neither  Peter  nor  Joan,  although  they  were  members  of 
the  best  educated  class  in  the  community  and  had  been 
given  the  best  education  available  for  that  class,  had  any 
but  the  vaguest  knowledge  of  what  was  going  on  in  the 
political  world.  They  knew  practically  nothing  of  what  a 
modern  imperial  system  consisted,  had  but  the  vaguest  ideas 
of  the  role  of  Foreign  Office,  Press  and  Parliament  in  inter- 
national affairs,  were  absolutely  ignorant  of  the  direction  of 
the  army  and  navy,  knew  nothing  of  the  history  of  Germany 
or  Russia  during  the  previous  half-century,  or  the  United 
States  since  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  had  no  inklings 
of  the  elements  of  European  ethnology,  and  had  scarcely  ever 
heard  such  words,  for  example,  as  Slovene,  or  Slovak,  or 
Ukrainian.  The  items  of  foreign  intelligence  in  the  news- 
papers joined  on  to  no  living  historical  conceptions  in  their 
minds.  Between  the  latest  history  they  had  read  and  the 
things  that  happened  about  them  and  in  which  they  were 
now  helplessly  involved,  was  a  gap  of  a  hundred  years  or 
more;  the  profound  changes  in  human  life  and  political  con- 
ditions brought  about  during  that  hundred  years  by  rail- 
ways, telegraphs,  steam  ship}) ing,  steel  castings  and  the  like, 
were  all  beyond  the  scope  of  their  ideas.  For  Joan  history 
meant  stories  about  Joan  of  Arc,  Jane  Shore,  the  wives  of 
Henry  the  Eighth,  James  I.  and  his  Steenie,  Charles  the 
Second,  and  suchlike  people,  winding  up  with  the  memoirs 
of  Madame  d'Arblay;  Peter  had  ended  his  historical  studies 
when  he  went  on  to  the  modern  side  at  Caxton — it  would 
have  made  little  difference  so  far  as  modern  affairs  were 
concerned  if  he  had  taken  a  degree  in  history — and  was 
chiefly  conversant  with  such  things  as  the  pedigree  of  the 
Electress  Sophia  of  Hanover,  the  Constitutions  of  Claren- 
don, the  statute  of  Mortmain,  and  the  claims  of  Edward  the 
Third  and  Henry  the  Fifth  to  the  crown  of  France.  Neither 
of  them  knew  anything  at  all  of  India  except  by  way  of  Kip- 
ling's stories  and  the  Coronation  Durbar  pictures.  If  the 
two  of  them  had  rather  clearer  ideas  than  most  of  their  as- 
sociates about  the  recent  opening  up  and  partition  of  Africa 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      451 

it  was  because  Oswald  had  talked  about  those  things.  But 
the  jostling  for  empire  that  had  been  going  on  for  the  past 
fifty  years  all  over  the  world,  and  the  succession  of  Imperial- 
ist theories  from  Disraeli  to  Joseph  Chamberlain  and  from 
Bismarck  to  Treitsehke,  had  no  place  in  their  thoughts.  The 
entente  cordiale  was  a  phrase  of  no  particular  significance  to 
them.  The  State  in  which  they  lived  had  never  explained 
to  them  in  any  way  its  relations  to  them  nor  its  fears  and 
aims  in  regard  to  the  world  about  it.  It  is  doubtful,  indeed, 
if  the  State  in  which  they  lived  possessed  the  mentality  to 
explain  as  much  even  to  itself. 

How  far  the  best  education  in  America  or  Germany  or  any 
other  country  was  better,  it  is  not  for  us  to  discuss  here, 
nor  how  much  better  education  might  be.  This  is  the  story 
of  the  minds  of  Joan  and  Peter  and  of  how  that  vast  system 
of  things  hidden,  things  unanalysed  and  things  misrepre- 
sented and  obscured,  the  political  system  of  the  European 
"empires"  burst  out  into  war  about  them.  The  sprawling, 
clumsy,  heedless  British  State,  which  had  troubled  so  little 
about  taking  Peter  into  its  confidence,  displayed  now  no  hesi- 
tation whatever  in  beckoning  him  home  to  come  and  learn  as 
speedily  as  possible  how  to  die  for  it. 

The  tragedy  of  youth  in  the  great  war  was  a  universal 
tragedy,  and  if  the  German  youths  who  were  now,  less  freely 
and  more  systematically,  beating  Peter  by  weeks  and  months 
in  a  universal  race  into  uniform,  were  more  instructed  than 
he,  they  were  also  far  more  thoroughly  misinformed.  If 
Peter  took  hold  of  the  war  by  the  one  elemental  fact  that 
Belgium  had  been  invaded  most  abominably  and  peaceful 
villagers  murdered  in  their  own  fields,  the  young  Germans 
on  the  other  hand  had  been  trained  to  a  whole  system  of  false 
interpretations.  They  were  assured  that  they  fought  to 
break  up  a  ring  of  threatening  enemies.  And  that  the  whole 
thing  was  going  to  be  the  most  magnificent  adventure  in  his- 
tory. Their  minds  had  been  prepared  elaborately  and  per- 
sistently for  this  heroic  struggle — in  which  they  were  to 
win  easily.  They  had  been  made  to  believe  themselves  a  race 
of  blond  aristocrats  above  all  the  rest  of  mankind,  entitled 
by  their  moral  and  mental  worth  to  world  dominion.  They 


452  JOAN  AND  PETER 

believed  that  now  they  did  but  come  to  their  own.  They 
had  been  taught  all  these  things  from  childhood ;  how  could 
they  help  but  believe  them? 

Peter  arrived,  tired  and  dirty,  at  Pelham  Ford  in  the 
early  afternoon.  Oswald  and  Joan  were  out,  but  he  bathed 
and  changed  while  Mrs.  Moxton  got  him  a  belated  lunch. 
As  he  finished  this  Joan  came  into  the  dining-room  from  a 
walk. 

"Hullo,  Petah,"  she  said,  with  no  display  of  affection. 

"Hullo,  Joan." 

"We  thought  you  were  never  coming." 

"I  was  in  Italy,"  said  Peter. 

"H'm,"  said  Joan,  and  seemed  to  reckon  in  her  mind. 

"Nobby  is  in  London,"  she  said.  "He  thinks  he  might 
help  about  East  Africa.  It's  his  country  practically.  .  .  . 
Are  you  going  to  enlist?" 

"What  else?"  said  Peter,  tapping  a  cigarette  on  the  table. 
"It's  a  beastly  bore." 

' '  Bunny 's  gone, ' '  said  Joan.     ' '  And  Wilmington. ' ' 

"They've  written?" 

"Willy  came  to  see  me." 

"Heard  from  any  of  the  others?" 

"Oh!  .  .  .  Troop." 

41  Enlisted?" 

"  Cadet." 

4 'Any  one  else?" 

"No,"  said  Joan,  and  hovered  whistling  faintly  for  a 
moment  and  then  walked  out  of  the  room.  .  .  . 

She  had  been  counting  the  hours  for  four  days,  perplexed 
by  his  delay;  his  coming  had  seemed  the  greatest  event  in 
the  world,  for  she  had  never  doubted  he  would  come  back 
to  serve,  and  now  that  he  had  come  she  met  him  like  this ! 


§  3 

They  dressed  for  dinner  that  night  because  Oswald  came 
back  tired  and  vexed  from  London  and  wanted  a  bath 
before  dining.  "They  seemed  to  be  sending  everybody  to 
East  Africa  on  the  principle  that  any  one  who's  been  there 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      453 

before  ought  not  to  go  again,"  he  grumbled.  "I  can't  see- 
any  other  principle  in  it."  He  talked  at  first  of  the  coming- 
East  African  campaign  because  he  hesitated  to  ask  Peter- 
what  he  intended  to  do.  Then  he  went  on  to  the  war  news. 
The  Germans  had  got  Liege.  That  was  certain  now.  They 
had  smashed  the  forts  to  pieces  with  enormous  cannon. 
There  had  been  a  massacre  of  civilians  at  Dinant.  Joan 
did  not  talk  very  much,  but  sat  and  watched  Peter  closely 
with  an  air  of  complete  indifference. 

There  was  a  change  in  him,  and  she  could  not  say  exactly 
what  this  change  was.  The  sunshine  and  snow  glare  and  wind 
of  the  high  mountains  had  tanned  his  face  to  a  hard  bronze 
and  he  was  perceptibly  leaner ;  that  made  him  look  older  per- 
haps; but  the  difference  was  more  than  that.  She  knew  her- 
Peter  so  well  that  she  could  divine  a  new  thought  in  him. 

"And  what  are  you  going  to  do,  Peter?"  said  Oswald^ 
coming  to  it  abruptly. 
'I'm  going  to  enlist." 

'In  the  ranks,  you  mean?"  Oswald  had  expected  that. 
'Yes." 

'You  ought  not  to  do  that." 
'Why  not?" 

'You  have  your  cadet  corps  work  behind  you.  You  ought 
to  take  a  commission.  We  shan't  have  too  many  officers." 

Peter  considered  that. 

"I  want  to  begin  in  the  ranks.  ...  I  want  discipline." 

(Had  some  moral  miracle  happened  to  Peter?  This  was. 
quite  a  new  note  from  our  supercilious  foster  brother.) 

"You'll  get  discipline  enough  in  the  cadet  corps." 

"I  want  to  begin  right  down  at  the  bottom  of  the  ladder." 

"Well,  if  you  get  a  rotten  drill  sergeant,  I'm  told,  it's  dis- 
agreeable." 

."All  the  better." 

"They'll  find  you  out  and  push  you  into  a  commission," 
said  Oswald.  "If  not,  it's  sheer  waste." 

"Well,  I  want  to  feel  what  discipline  is  like — before  I 
give  orders,"  said  Peter.  "I  want  to  be  told  to  do  things 
and  asked  why  the  devil  I  haven't  done  'em  smartly.  I've 
been  going  too  easy.  The  ranks  will  brace  me  up." 

(Yes,  this  was  a  new  note.     Had  that  delay  of  four  or  five 


454  JOAN  AND  PETER 

days  anything  to  do  with  this?  .  .  .  Joan,  with  a  start,  dis- 
covered that  she  was  holding  up  the  dinner,  and  touched  the 
electric  bell  at  her  side  for  the  course  to  be  changed.) 

"I  suppose  we  shall  all  have  to  brace  up,"  said  Oswald. 
"It  still  seems  a  little  unreal.  The  French  have  lost  Mulhau- 
sen  again,  they  say,  but  they  are  going  strong  for  Metz. 
There's  not  a  word  about  our  army.  It's  just  crossed  over 
and  vanished.  ..." 

(Queer  to  sit  here,  dining  in  the  soft  candlelight,  and  to 
think  of  the  crowded  roads  and  deploying  troops,  the  thud- 
ding guns  and  bursting  shells  away  there  behind  that  veil  of 
secrecy — millions  of  men  in  France  and  Belgium  fighting 
for  the  world.  And  Peter  would  go  off  tomorrow.  Pres- 
ently he  would  be  in  uniform ;  presently  he  would  be  part  of 
a  marching  column.  lie  would  go  over — into  the  turmoil. 
Beyond  that  her  imagination  would  not  pass.) 

"I  wish  I  could  enlist,"  said  Joan. 

"They're  getting  thousands  of  men  more  than  they  can 
handle  as  it  is,"  said  Oswald.  "They  don't  want  you." 

"You'd  have  thought  they'd  have  had  things  planned  and 
ready  for  this,"  said  Peter. 

"Nothing  is  ready,"  said  Oswald.  "Nothing  is  planned. 
This  war  has  caught  our  war  office  fast  asleep.  It  isn't  half 
awake  even  now." 

"There  ought  to  be  something  for  women  to  do,"  said  Joan. 

"There  ought  to  be  something  for  every  one  to  do,"  said 
Oswald  bitterly,  "but  there  isn't.  This  country  isn't  a 
State;  it's  a  crowd  adrift.  Did  you  notice,  Peter,  as  you 
came  through  London,  the  endless  multitudes  of  people  just 
standing  about?  I've  never  seen  London  like  that  before. 
People  not  walking  about  their  business,  but  just  stand- 
ing."  .  .  . 

Peter  told  of  things  he  had  seen  on  his  way  home.  "The 
French  are  in  a  scowling  state.  All  France  scowls  at  you, 
and  Havre  is  packed  with  bargains  in  touring  cars — just  left 
about — by  rich  people  coming  home.  ..." 

So  the  talk  drifted.  And  all  the  time  Joan  watched  Peter 
as  acutely  and  as  unsuspectedly  as  a  mother  might  watch  a 
grown-up  son.  Tomorrow  morning  he  would  go  off  and  join 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      455 

up.  But  it  wasn't  that  which  made  him  grave.  New  ex- 
periences always  elated  Peter.  And  he  wouldn't  be  afraid; 
not  he.  ...  She  had  been  let  into  the  views  of  three  other 
young  men  who  had  gone  to  war  already ;  Troop  had  written, 
correctly  and  consciously  heroic,  "Some  of  the  chaps  seem 
to  be  getting  a  lot  of  emotion  into  it,"  said  Troop.  "It's 
nothing  out  of  the  way  that  1  can  see.  One  just  falls  into  the 
line  of  one's  uncles  and  cousins." 

Wilmington  had  said:  "I  just  wanted  to  see  you,  Joan. 
I'm  told  I'll  be  most  useful  as  a  gunner  because  of  my  mathe- 
matics. When  it  comes  to  going  over,  you  won't  forget  to 
think  of  me,  Joan?" 

Joan  answered  truthfully.  "I'll  think  of  you  a  lot, 
Billy." 

"There's  nothing  in  life  like  you,  Joan,"  said  Wilmington 
in  his  white  expressionless  way.  "Well,  I  suppose  I'd  better 
be  going." 

But  Bunny  had  discoursed  upon  fear.  "-I've  enlisted," 
he  wrote,  "chiefly  because  I'm  afraid  of  going  Pacifist  right 
out — out  of  funk.  But  it's  hell,  Joan.  I'm  afraid  in  my 
bones.  I  hate  bangs,  and  they  say  the  row  of  modern  artil- 
lery is  terrific.  I've  never  seen  a  dead  body,  a  human  dead 
body,  I  mean,  ever.  Have  you?  I  would  go  round  a  quar- 
ter of  a  mile  out  of  my  way  any  time  to  dodge  a  butcher's 
shop.  I  was  sick  when  I  found  Peter  dissecting  a  rabbit. 
You  know,  sick,  a  la  Manche.  No  metaphors.  I  shall  run 
away,  I  know  I  shall  run  away.  But  we've  got  to  stop  these 
beastly  Germans  anyhow.  It  isn't  killing  the  Germans  I 
shall  mind — I'm  fierce  on  Germans,  Joan;  but  seeing  the 
chaps  on  stretchers  or  lying  about  with  all  sorts  of  horrible 
injuries." 

Sheets  of  that  sort  of  thing,  written  in  an  unusually  bad 
handwriting — apparently  rather  to  comfort  himself  than  to 
sustain  Joan. 

Well,  it  wasn't  Peter's  way  to  think  beforehand  of  being 
"on  stretchers  or  lying  about,"  but  Bunny's  scribblings  had 
got  the  stretchers  into  Joan's  thoughts.  And  it  made  her 
wish  somehow  that  Peter,  instead  of  being  unusually  grave 
and  choosing  to  be  a  ranker,  was  taking  this  job  with  his 


456  JOAN  AND  PETER 

usual  easy  confidence  and  going  straight  and  gaily  for  a  com- 
mission. 

After  dinner  they  all  sat  out  in  garden  chairs,  outside  the 
library  window,  and  had  their  coffee  and  smoked.  Joan  got 
her  chair  and  drew  it  close  to  Peter's.  Two  hundred  miles 
away  arid  less  was  battle  and  slaughter,  perhaps  creeping 
nearer  to  them,  the  roaring  of  great  guns,  the  rattle  of  rifle 
fire,  the  hoarse  shouts  of  men  attacking,  and  a  gathering 
harvest  of  limp  figures  "on  stretchers  and  lying  about";  but 
that  evening  at  Pelham  Ford  was  a  globe  of  golden  serenity. 
Not  a  leaf  stirred,  and  only  the  little  squeaks  and  rustlings 
of  small  creatures  that  ran  and  flitted  in  the  dusk  ruffled  the 
quiet  air. 

Oswald  made  Peter  talk  of  his  climbing.  "My  only 
mountain  is  Kilimanjaro,"  he  said.  "No  great  thing  so  far 
as  actual  climbing  goes."  Peter  had  begun  with  the  Dolo- 
mites, had  gone  over  to  Adelboden,  and  then  worked  round 
by  the  Concordia  Hut  to  Bel  Alp.  "Was  it  very  beautiful  ? ' ' 
.asked  Joan  softly  under  his  elbow. 

"You  could  have  done  it  all.  I  wish  you  had  come,"  said 
Peter. 

There  was  a  pause. 

^'And  Italy?"  said  Joan,  still  more  softly. 

"Where  did  you  go  in  Italy,  Peter?"  said  Oswald,  pick- 
ing up  her  question. 

Peter  gave  a  travel-book  description  of  Orta  and  the  Isle 
•of  San  Giulio. 

Joan  sat  as  still  and  watchful  as  a  little  cat  watching  for 
,a  mouse.  (Something  had  put  Peter  out  in  Italy.) 

"It's  off  the  main  line,"  said  Peter.  "The  London  and 
Paris  papers  don't  arrive,  and  one  has  to  fall  back  on  the 
'Carrier e  delta  Sera." 

"Very  good  paper  too,"  said  Oswald. 

"News  doesn't  seem  so  real  in  a  language  you  don't  un- 
derstand." 

He  was  excusing  himself.  So  he  was  ashamed  to  that 
extent.  That  was  what  was  bothering  him.  One  might  have 
known  he  wouldn't  care  for — those  other  things.  .  .  . 

Late  that  night  Joan  sat  in  her  room  thinking.  Presently 
she  unlocked  her  writing-desk  and  took  out  and  re-read  a  let- 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      457 

ter.  It  was  from  Hunt  ley  in  Cornwall,  and  it  was  very 
tender  and  passionate.  "The  world  has  gone  mad,  dearest," 
it  ran;  "'but  we  need  not  go  mad.  The  full  moon  is  slipping 
by.  I  lay  out  on  the  sands  last  night  praying  for  you  to 
come,  trying  to  will  you  to  come.  Oh — when  are  you  com- 
ingf-  .  .  . 

And  much  more  to  the  same  effect.  .  .  . 

Joan's  face  hardened.  "Po'try,"  she  said.  She  took 
a  sharpened  pencil  from  the  glass  tray  upon  her  writing- 
table  and  regarded  it.  The  pencil  was  finely  pointed — too 
finely  pointed.  She  broke  off  the  top  with  the  utmost  care 
and  tested  the  blunt  point  on  her  blotting-paper  to  see  if  it 
was  broad  enough  for  her  purpose.  Then  she  scrawled  her 
reply  across  his  letter — in  five  words:  "You  ought  to  enlist. 
Joan,"  and  addressed  an  envelope  obliquely  in  the  same  un- 
civil script. 

After  which  she  selected  sundry  other  letters  and  a  snap- 
shot giving  a  not  unfavourable  view  of  Huntley  from  her 
desk,  and  having  scrutinized  the  latter  for  an  interval,  tore 
them  all  carefully  into  little  bits  and  dropped  them  into  her 
wastepaper  basket.  She  stood  regarding  these  fragments 
for  some  time.  "I  might  have  gone  to  him,"  she  whispered 
at  last,  and  turned  away. 

She  blew  out  her  candle,  hesitated  by  her  bedside,  and 
walked  to  the  open  window  to  watch  the  moon  rise. 

She  sat  upon  her  window-sill  like  a  Joan  of  marble  for  a 
long  time.  Then  she  produced  one  of  those  dark  sayings 
with  which  she  was  wont  to  wrap  rather  than  express  her  pro- 
founder  thoughts. 

"Queer  how  suddenly  one  discovers  at  last  what  one  has. 
known  all  along.  .  .  .  Queer.  .  .  . 

"Well,  1  know  anyhow."  .  .  . 

She  stood  up  at  last  and  yawned.  "But  I  don't  like  war,"' 
said  Joan.  "Stretchers!  Or  lying  about!  Groaning.  In 
the  darkness.  Boys  one  has  danced  with.  Oh!  beastly. 
Beastly!" 

She  forgot  her  intention  of  undressing,  put  her  foot  on 
the  sill,  and  rested  chin  on  fist  and  elbow  on  knee,  scowling 
out  at  the  garden  as  though  she  saw  things  that  she  did  not 
like  there. 


458  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  4 

So  it  was  that  Joan  saw  the  beginning  of  the  great  win- 
nowing of  mankind,  and  Peter  came  home  in  search  of  his 
duty. 

Within  the  first  month  of  the  war  nearly  every  one  of  the 
men  in  Joan's  world  had  been  spun  into  the  vortex;  hers 
was  so  largely  a  world  of  young  or  unattached  people,  with 
no  deep  roots  in  business  or  employment  to  hold  them  back. 
Even  Oswald  at  last,  in  spite  of  many  rebuffs,  found  a  use 
for  himself  in  connection  with  a  corps  of  African  labourers 
behind  the  front,  and  contrived  after  a  steady  pressure  of 
many  mouths  towards  the  danger  zone,  to  get  himself 
wounded  while  he  was  talking  to  some  of  his  dear  Masai  at 
an  ammunition  dump.  A  Hun  raider  dropped  a  bomb,  and 
some  flying  splinters  of  wood  cut  him  deeply  and  extensively. 
The  splinters  were  vicious  splinters;  there  were  complica- 
tions; and  he  found  himself  back  at  Pelham  Ford  before  the 
end  of  1916,  aged  by  ten  years.  The  Woman's  Legion  cap- 
tured Joan  from  the  date  of  its  formation,  and  presently  had 
her  driving  a  car  for  the  new  Ministry  of  Munitions,  which 
came  into  existence  in  the  middle  of  1915. 

Her  career  as  a  chauffeuse  was  a  brilliant  one.  She  lived, 
after  the  free  manner  of  the  Legion,  with  Miss  Jepsou  at 
Hampstead;  she  went  down  every  morning  to  her  work,  she 
drove  her  best  and  her  best  continually  improved,  so  that 
she  became  distinguished  among  her  fellows.  The  Ministry 
grew  aware  of  her  and  proud  of  her.  A  time  arrived  when 
important  officials  quarrelled  to  secure  her  for  their  jour- 
neys. Eminent  foreign  visitors  invariably  found  themselves 
behind  her. 

"But  she  drives  like  a  man,"  they  would  say,  a  little 
breathlessly,  after  some  marvellously  skidded  corner. 

"All  our  girls  drive  like  this,"  the  Ministry  of  Munitions 
would  remark,  carelessly,  loyally,  but  untruthfully. 

Joan 's  habitual  wear  became  khaki ;  she  had  puttees  and 
stout  boots  and  little  brass  letterings  upon  her  shoulders  and 
sleeves,  and  the  only  distinctive  touches  she  permitted  her- 
self were  the  fur  of  her  overcoat  collar  and  a  certain  foppery 
about  her  gauntlets.  .  .  . 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      459 

Extraordinary  and  profound  changes  of  mood  and  re- 
lationship occurred  in  the  British  mind  during  those  first  two 
years  of  the  war,  and  reflected  themselves  upon  the  minds 
of  Joan  and  Peter.  To  begin  with,  and  for  nearly  a  year, 
there  was  a  quality  of  spectacularity  about  the  war  for  the 
British.  They  felt  it  to  be  an  immense  process  and  a 
vitally  significant  process;  they  read,  they  talked,  they 
thought  of  little  else ;  but  it  was  not  yet  felt  to  be  an  intimate 
process.  The  habit  of  detachment  was  too  deeply  ingrained. 
Great  Britain  was  an  island  of  onlookers.  To  begin  with 
the  war  seemed  like  something  tremendous  and  arresting  go- 
ing on  in  an  arena.  "Business  as  usual,"  said  the  business 
man,  putting  up  the  price  of  anything  the  country  seemed  to 
need.  There  was  a  profound  conviction  that  British  life 
and  the  British  community  were  eternal  things;  they  might 
play  a  part — a  considerable  part — in  these  foreign  affairs; 
they  might  even  have  to  struggle,  but  it  was  inconceivable 
that  they  should  change  or  end.  September  and  October  in 
1014  saw  an  immense  wave  of  volunteer  enthusiasm — enthusi- 
asm for  the  most  part  thwarted  and  wasted  by  the  unpre- 
paredness  of  the  authorities  for  anything  of  the  sort,  but  it 
was  the  enthusiasm  of  an  audience  eager  to  go  on  the  stage ; 
it  was  not  the  enthusiasm  of  performers  in  the  arena  and 
unable  to  quit  the  arena,  fighting  for  life  or  death.  To 
secure  any  sort  of  official  work  was  to  step  out  of  the  un- 
distinguished throng.  In  uniform  one  felt  dressed  up  and 
part  of  the  pageant.  Young  soldiers  were  self-conscious  in 
those  early  days,  and  inclined  to  pose  at  the  ordinary  citizen. 
The  ordinary  citizen  wanted  to  pat  young  soldiers  on  the 
back  and  stand  them  drinks  out  of  his  free  largesse.  They 
were  "in  it,"  he  felt,  and  he  at  most  was  a  patron  of  the 
affair. 

That  spectacularity  gave  way  to  a  sense  of  necessary  par- 
ticipation only  very  slowly  indeed.  The  change  began  as 
the  fresh,  bright  confidence  that  the  Battle  of  the  Marne  had 
begotten  gave  place  to  a  deepening  realization  of  the  diffi- 
culties on  the  road  to  any  effective  victory.  The  persuasion 
spread  from  mind  to  mind  that  if  Great  Britain  was  to  fight 
this  war  as  she  had  lived  through  sixty  years  of  peace,  the 
gentleman  amateur  among  the  nations,  she  would  lose  this 


460  JOAN  AND  PETER 

war.  The  change  of  spirit  that  produced  its  first  marked 
result  in  the  creation  of  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  with  a 
new  note  of  quite  unofficial  hustle,  and  led  on  through  a 
series  of  inevitable  steps  to  the  adoption  of  conscription, 
marks  a  real  turning  about  of  the  British  mind,  the  close  of 
a  period  of  chaotic  freedom  almost  unprecedented  in  the  his- 
tory of  communities.  It  was  the  rediscovery  of  the  State  as 
the  necessary  form  into  which  the  individual  life  must  fit. 

To  the  philosophical  historian  of  the  future  the  efforts  of 
governing  and  leading  people  in  Great  Britain  to  get  wills 
together,  to  explain  necessities,  to  supplement  the  frightful 
gaps  in  the  education  of  every  class  by  hastily  improvised 
organizations,  by  speeches,  press-campaigns,  posters,  circu- 
lars, cinema  shows,  parades  and  proclamations;  hasty, 
fitful,  ill-conducted  and  sometimes  dishonestly  conducted 
appeals  though  they  were,  will  be  far  more  interesting  than 
any  story  of  battles  arid  campaigns.  They  remind  one  of  a 
hand  scrambling  in  the  dark  for  something  long  neglected 
and  now  found  to  be  vitally  important;  they  are  like  voices 
calling  in  a  dark  confusion.  They  were  England  seeking  to 
comprehend  herself  and  her  situation  after  the  slumber  of  two 
centuries.  But  to  people  like  Joan  and  Peter,  who  were  not 
philosophical  historians,  the  process  went  on,  not  as  a  process, 
but  as  an  apparently  quite  disconnected  succession  of  events. 
Imperceptibly  their  thoughts  changed  and  were  socialized. 
Joan  herself  had  no  suspicion  of  the  difference  in  orientation 
between  the  Joan  who  stood  at  her  bedroom  window  in 
August,  1914,  the  most  perfect  spectator  of  life,  staring  out 
at  the  darkness  of  the  garden,  dumbly  resenting  the  call  that 
England  was  making  upon  the  free  lives  of  all  her  friends, 
and  the  Joan  of  1917,  in  khaki  and  a  fur-collared  coat,  who 
slung  a  great,  car  with  a  swift,  unerring  confidence  through 
the  London  traffic  and  out  to  Woolwich  or  Hendon  or  Wal- 
tham  or  Aldershot  or  Chelmsford  or  what  not,  keen  and 
observant  of  the  work  her  passengers  discussed,  a  conscious 
part  now  of  a  great  and  growing  understanding  and  criticism 
and  will,  of  a  rediscovered  unity,  which  was  England — 
awakening. 

Youth  grew  wise  very  fast  in  those  tremendous  years. 
From  the  simple  and  spectacular  acceptance  of  every  obvious 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      461 

appearance,  the  younger  minds  passed  very  rapidly  to  a 
critical  and  intricate  examination.  In  the  first  blaze  of 
indignation  against  Germany,  in  the  first  enthusiasm,  there 
was  a  disposition  to  trust  and  confide  in  every  one  in  a  po- 
sition of  authority  and  responsibility.  The  War  Office  was 
supposed — against  every  possibility — to  be  planning  wisely 
and  acting  rapidly;  the  wisdom  of  the  Admiralty  was  taken 
for  granted,  the  politicians  now  could  have  no  end  in  view 
but  victory.  It  was  assumed  that  Sir  Edward  Carson  could 
become  patriotic,  Lord  Curzon  self-forgetful,  Mr.  Asquith 
energetic,  and  Mr.  Lloyd  George  straightforward.  It  was 
indeed  a  phase  of  extravagant  idealism.  Throughout  the 
opening  weeks  of  the  war  there  was  an  appearance,  there 
was  more  than  an  appearance,  of  a  common  purpose  and  a 
mutual  confidence.  The  swift  response  of  the  Irish  to  the 
call  of  the  time,  the  generous  loyalty  of  India,  were  like  inti- 
mations of  a  new  age.  The  whole  Empire  was  uplifted;  a 
flush  of  unwonted  splendour  suffused  British  affairs. 

Then  the  light  faded  again.  There  was  no  depth  of  un- 
derstanding to  sustain  it;  habit  is  in  the  long  run  a  more 
powerful  thing  than  even  the  supremest  need.  In  a  little 
time  all  the  inglorious  characteristics  of  Britain  at  peace, 
the  double-mindedness,  the  slackness,  were  reappearing 
through  the  glow  of  warlike  emotion.  Fifty  years  of  under- 
education  are  not  to  be  atoned  for  in  a  week  of  crisis.  The 
men  in  power  were  just  the  same  men.  The  inefficient  were 
still  inefficient ;  the  individualists  still  self-seeking.  The  party 
politicians  forgot  their  good  resolutions,  and  reverted  to 
their  familiar  intrigues  and  manoeuvres.  Redmond  and 
Ireland  learnt  a  bitter  lesson  of  the  value  of  generosity  in 
the  face  of  such  ignorant  and  implacable  antagonists  as  the 
Carsonites.  Britain,  it  became  manifest,  had  neither  the 
greatness  of  education  nor  yet  the  simplicity  of  will  to  make 
war  brilliantly  or  to  sustain  herself  splendidly.  At  every 
point  devoted  and  able  people  found  themselves  baffled  by 
the  dull  inertias  of  the  old  system.  And  the  clear  flame 
of  enthusiasm  that  blazed  out  from  the  youth  of  the  country 
at  the  first  call  of  the  war  was  coloured  more  and  more  by 
disillusionment  as  that  general  bickering  which  was  British 
public  life  revived  again,  and  a  gathering  tale  of  waste,  fail- 


462  JOAN  AND  PETER 

ure,  and  needless  suffering  mocked  the  reasonable  expectation 
of  a  swift  and  glorious  victory. 

The  change  in  the  thought  and  attitude  of  the  youth  of 
Britain  is  to  be  found  expressed  very  vividly  in  the  war 
poetry  of  the  successive  years.  Such  glowing  young  heroes 
as  Julian  Grenfell  and  Rupert  Brooke  shine  with  a  faith 
undimmed ;  they  fight  consciously,  confident  of  the  nearness 
of  victory;  they  sing  and  die  in  what  they  believe  to  be  a 
splendid  cause  and  for  a  splendid  end.  An  early  death  in 
the  great  war  was  not  an  unmitigated  misfortune.  Three 
years  later  the  young  soldier's  mind  found  a  voice  in  such 
poetry  as  that  of  young  Siegfried  Sassoon,  who  came  home 
from  the  war  with  medals  and  honours  only  to  denounce  the 
war  in  verse  of  the  extremest  bitterness.  His  song  is  no 
longer  of  picturesque  nobilities  and  death  in  a  glorious  cause ; 
it  is  a  cry  of  anger  at  the  old  men  who  have  led  the  world  to 
destruction ;  of  anger  against  the  dull,  ignorant  men  who  can 
neither  make  war  nor  end  war;  the  men  who  have  lost  the 
freshness  and  simplicity  but  none  of  the  greed  and  egotism 
of  youth.  Germany  is  no  longer  the  villain  of  the  piece. 
Youth  turns  upon  age,  upon  laws  and  institutions,  upon  the 
whole  elaborate  rottenness  of  the  European  system,  saying: 
"What  is  this  to  which  you  have  brought  us?  What  have 
you  done  with  our  lives?" 

No  story  of  these  years  can  ever  be  true  that  does  not 
pass  under  a  shadow.  Of  the  little  group  of  youths  and 
men  who  have  figured  in  this  story  thus  far,  there  was 
scarcely  one  who  was  not  either  killed  outright  or  crippled 
or  in  some  way  injured  in  the  Great  War — excepting  only 
Huntley.  Huntley  developed  a  deepening  conscience  against 
warfare  as  the  war  went  on,  and  suffered  nothing  worse  than 
some  unpleasant  half-hours  with  Tribunals  and  the  fatigues 
of  agricultural  labour.  Death,  which  had  first  come  to  Joan 
as  a  tragic  end  to  certain  "kittays, "  was  now  the  familiar 
associate  of  her  every  friend.  Her  confidence  in  the  safety 
of  the  world,  in  the  wisdom  of  human  laws  and  institutions, 
in  the  worth  and  dignity  of  empires  and  monarchs,  and  the 
collective  sanity  of  mankind  was  withdrawn  as  a  veil  is 
withdrawn,  from  the  harsh  realities  of  life. 

Wilmington,  with  his  humourless  intensity,  was  one  of 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      463 

the  first  to  bring  home  to  her  this  disillusionment  and  tragedy 
of  the  youth  of  the  world.  He  liked  pure  mathematics;  it 
was  a  subject  in  which  he  felt  comfortable.  lie  had  worked 
well  in  the  first  part  of  the  mathematical  tripos,  and  he  was 
working  hard  in  the  second  part  when  the  war  broke  out. 
He  fluctuated  for  some  days  between  an  utter  repudiation  of 
all  war  and  an  immediate  enlistment,  and  it  was  probably 
the  light  and  colour  of  Joan  in  his  mind  that  made  Wilming- 
ton a  warrior.  War  was  a  business  of  killing,  he  decided, 
and  what  he  had  to  do  was  to  apply  himself  and  his  mathe- 
matics to  gunnery  as  efficiently  as  possible,  learning  as 
rapidly  as  might  be  all  that  was  useful  about  shells,  guns  and 
explosives,  and  so  get  to  the  killing  of  Germans  thoroughly, 
expeditiously,  and  abundantly.  He  was  a  particularly  joy- 
less young  officer,  white-faced  and  intent,  with  an  appear- 
ance of  scorn  that  presently  developed  from  appearance  into 
reality,  for  most  of  his  colleagues.  He  was  working  as  hard 
and  as  well  as  he  could.  At  first  with  incredulity  and  then 
with  disgust  he  realized  that  the  ordinary  British  officer 
was  not  doing  so.  They  sang  songs,  they  ragged,  they  left 
things  to  chance,  they  thought  blunders  funny,  they  con- 
doned silliness  and  injustice  in  the  powers  above.  He  would 
not  sing  nor  rag  nor  drink.  He  worked  to  the  verge  of  ex- 
haustion. But  this  exemplary  conduct,  oddly  enough,  did 
not  make  him  unpopular  either  with  the  junior  officers  or 
with  his  seniors.  The  former  tolerated  him  and  rather  ad- 
mired him;  the  latter  put  work  upon  him  and  sought  to 
promote  him. 

In  quite  a  little  while  as  it  seemed — for  in  those  days, 
while  each  day  seemed  long  and  laborious  and  heavy,  yet  the 
weeks  and  months  passed  swiftly — he  was  a  captain  in 
France,  and  before  the  end  of  1915  he  wrote  to  say  that  his 
major  had  left  him  practically  in  command  of  his  battery 
for  three  weeks.  He  had  been  twice  slightly  wounded  by 
that  time,  but  he  got  little  leisure  because  he  was  willing  and 
indispensable. 

He  wrote  to  Joan  very  regularly.  He  was  a  motherless 
youth,  and  Joan  -was  not  only  his  great  passion  but  his 
friend  and  confidante.  His  interest  in  his  work  overflowed 
into  his  letters;  they  were  more  and  more  about  gunnery 


464  JOAN  AND  PETEE 

and  the  art  of  war,  which  became  at  last,  it  would  seem,  a 
serious  rival  to  Joan  in  his  affections.  He  described  ill, 
but  he  would  send  her  reasoned  statements  of  unanswerable 
views.  He  could  not  understand  why  considerations  that 
were  so  plain  as  to  be  almost  obvious,  were  being  universally 
disregarded  by  the  Heads  and  the  "War  Office.  He  appealed 
to  Joan  to  read  what  he  had  to  say,  and  tell  him  whether 
he  or  the  world  was  mad.  When  he  came  back  on  leave  in 
the  spring  of  1916,  she  was  astonished  to  find  that  he  was 
still  visibly  as  deeply  in  love  with  her  as  ever.  The  fact  of 
it  was  he  had  words  for  his  gunnery  and  military  science, 
but  he  had  no  words,  and  that  was  the  essence  of  his  mis- 
fortune, for  his  love  for  Joan. 

But  the  burthen  of  his  story  was  bitter  disillusionment 
at  the  levity  with  which  his  country  could  carry  on  a  war 
that  must  needs  determine  the  whole  future  of  mankind. 
He  would  write  out  propositions  of  this  sort:  "It  is  mani- 
fest that  success  in  warfare  depends  upon  certain  primary 
factors,  of  which  generalship  is  one.  No  country  resolute 
to  win  a  war  will  spare  any  effort  to  find  the  best  men,  and 
make  them  its  generals  and  leaders  irrespective  of  every 
other  consideration.  No  honourable  patriots  will  permit  gen- 
erals to  be  appointed  by  any  means  except  the  best  selective 
methods,  and  no  one  who  cares  for  his  country  will  obstruct 
(1)  the  promotion,  (2)  trying  over,  and  (3)  prompt  removal, 
if  they  fail  to  satisfy  the  most  exacting  tests,  of  all  possible 
men.  And  next  consider  what  sort  of  men  will  be  the  best 
commanders.  They  must  be  fresh-minded  young  men.  All 
the  great  generals  of  the  world,  the  supreme  cases,  the 
Alexanders,  Napoleons,  and  so  on,  have  shown  their  quality 
before  thirty  even  in  the  days  when  strategy  and  tactics  did 
not  change  very  greatly  from  year  to  year,  and  now  when 
the  material  and  expedients  of  war  make  warfare  practically 
a  new  thing  every  few  years,  the  need  for  fresh  young  com- 
manders is  far  more  urgent  than  ever  it  has  been.  But  the 
British  army  is  at  present  commanded  by  oldish  men  who 
are  manifestly  of  not  more  than  mediocre  intelligence,  and 
who  have  no  knowledge  of  this  new  sort  of  war  that  has 
arisen.  It  is  a  war  of  guns  and  infantry — with  aeroplanes 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      465 

coming  in  more  and  more — and  most  of  the  higher  positions 
are  held  by  cavalry  officers;  the  artillery  is  invariably  com- 
manded by  men  unused  to  the  handling  of  such  heavy  guns 
as  we  are  using,  who  stick  far  behind  our  forward  positions 
and  decline  any  practical  experience  of  our  difficulties. 
They  put  us  in  the  wrong  positions,  they  move  us  about  ab- 
surdly; young  officers  have  had  to  work  out  most  of  the 
problems  of  gun-pits  and  so  forth  for  themselves — against 
resistance  and  mere  stupid  interference  from  above.  The 
Heads  have  no  idea  of  the  kind  of  work  we  do  or  of  the 
kind  of  work  we  could  do.  They  are  worse  than  amateurs; 
they  are  unteachable  fossils.  But  why  is  this  so?  If  the 
country  is  serious  about  the  war,  why  does  it  permit  it?  If 
the  Government  is  serious  about  the  war,  why  does  it  permit 
it?  If  the  War  Office  is  serious  about  the  war,  why  does  it 
permit  it?  If  G.H.Q.  is  serious  about  the  war,  why  does  it 
permit  it?  What  is  wrong?  There  is  a  hitch  here  I  don't 
understand.  Am  I  over-serious,  and  is  all  this  war  really 
some  sort  of  gross,  grim  joke,  Joan  ?  Do  I  take  life  too  seri- 
ously ? 

"Joan,  in  this  last  push  this  battery  did  its  little  job 
right;  we  cut  all  the  wire  opposite  us  and  blew  out  every 
blessed  stake.  We  made  a  nice  tidy  clean  up.  It  was  quite 
easy  to  do,  given  hard  work.  If  I  hadn't  done  it  I  ought 
either  to  have  been  shot  for  neglect  or  dismissed  for  inca- 
pacity. But  on  our  left  it  wasn't  done.  Well,  there  were 
at  least  a  hundred  poor  devils  of  our  infantrymen  on  that 
wire,  a  hundred  mothers'  sons,  hanging  like  rags  on  it  or 
crumpled  up  below.  I  saw  them.  It  made  me  sick.  And 
I  saw  the  chap  who  was  chiefly  responsible  for  that,  Major 
Clutterwell,  a  little  bit  screwed,  being  the  life  and  soul  of  a 
little  party  in  Hazebrouck  three  days  after!  He  ought  to 
have  been  the  life  and  soul  of  a  hari  kari  party,  but  either 
he  is  too  big  a  cad  or  too  big  a  fool — or  both.  The  way 
they  shy  away  our  infantrymen  over  here  is  damnable. 
They  are  the  finest  men  in  the  world,  I'm  convinced;  they 
will  go  at  anything,  and  the  red  tabs  send  them  into  impos- 
sible jobs,  fail  to  back  them  up — always  they  fail  to  back 
them  up;  they  neglect  them,  Joan;  they  neglect  them  even 


466  JOAN  AND  PETER 

when  they  are  fighting  and  dying!  There  are  men  here, 
colonels,  staff  officers,  I  would  like  to  beat  about  the  head  with 
an  iron  bar.  ..." 

This  was  an  unusually  eloquent  passage.  Frequently  his 
letters  were  mainly  diagram  to  show  for  example  how  we 
crowded  batteries  to  brass  away  at  right  angles  to  the 
trenches  when  we  ought  to  enfilade  them,  or  some  such  point. 
Sometimes  he  was  trying  to  establish  profound  truths  about 
the  proper  functions  of  field  guns  and  howitzers.  For  a 
time  he  was  gnawing  a  bitter  grievance.  "I  was  told  to  shell 
a  line  I  couldn't  reach.  The  contours  wouldn't  allow  of  it. 
You  can  do  a  lot  with  a  shell,  but  you  cannot  make  it  hop 
slightly  and  go  round  a  corner.  There  is  a  definite  limit  to 
the  height  to  which  a  gun  will  lob  a  shell.  I  tried  to  explain 
these  elementary  limitations  of  gunfire  through  the  telephone, 
and  I  was  told  I  should  be  put  tinder  arrest  if  1  did  not 
obey  orders.  I  wasn't  up  against  a  commander,  I  wasn't 
up  against  an  intelligence ;  I  was  up  against  a  silly  old  man 
in  a  temper.  So  I  put  over  a  barrage  about  fifty  yards  be- 
yond the  path — the  nearest  possible.  Every  one  was  per- 
fectly satisfied — the  Boche  included.  Thus  it  is  that  the 
young  officer  is  subdued  to  the  medium  he  works  in." 

At  times  Wilmington  would  embark  on  a  series  of  propo- 
sitions to  demonstrate  with  mathematical  certitude  that  if  the 
men  and  material  wasted  at  Loos  had  .been  used  in  the 
Dardanelles,  the  war  would  have  been  decided  by  the  end 
of  1915.  But  the  topic  to  which  his  mind  recurred  time  after 
time  was  the  topic  of  efficient  leadership.  "Modern  Avar 
demands  continuity  of  idea,  continuity  of  will,  and  continu- 
ous progressive  adaptation  of  means  and  methods,"  he  wrote 
— in  two  separate  letters.  In  the  second  of  these  he  had  got 
on  to  a  fresh  notion.  "Education  in  England  is  a  loafer 
education;  it  does  not  point  to  an  end;  it  does  not  drive 
through ;  it  does  not  produce  minds  that  can  hold  out  through 
a  long  effort.  The  young  officers  come  out  here  with  the 
best  intentions  in  the  world,  but  one's  everyday  life  is 
shaped  not  by  our  intentions  but  our  habits.  Their  habits 
of  mind  are  loafing  habits.  They  learnt  to  loaf  at  school. 
Caxton,  I  am  now  convinced,  is  one  of  the  best  schools  in 
England;  but  even  at  Caxton  we  did  not  fully  acquire  the 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      467 

habit  of  steadfast  haste  which  modern  life  demands.  Every- 
thing that  gets  done  out  here  is  done  by  a  spurt.  With  the 
idea  behind  it  of  presently  doing  nothing.  The  ordinary 
state  of  everybody  above  the  non-commissioned  ranks  is  loaf- 
ing. At  the  present  moment  my  major  is  shooting  pheasants ; 
the  batteries  to  the  left  of  us  are  cursing  because  they  have 
to  shift — it  holds  up  their  scheme  for  a  hunt.  Just  as  though 
artillery  work  wasn't  the  most  intense  sport  in  the  world — 
especially  now  that  we  are  going  to  have  kite  balloons  and 
do  really  scientific  observing.  Even  the  conscientious  men 
of  the  Kitchener-Byng  school  don't  really  seem  to  me  to 
get  on;  they  work  like  Trojans  at  established  and  routine 
stuff  but  they  don't  keep  up  inquiry.  They  are  human,  all 
too  human.  Man  is  a  sedentary  animal,  and  the  school- 
master exists  to  prevent  his  sitting  down  comfortably." 
This  from  Wilmington  without  a  suspicion  of  jesting. 
"This  human  weakness  for  just  living  can  only  be  corrected 
in  schools.  The  more  I  scheme  about  increasing  efficiency 
out  here,  the  more  I  realize  that  it  can't  be  done  here,  that 
one  has  to  go  right  back  to  the  schools  and  begin  with  a 
more  continuous  urge.  When  this  war  is  over  I  shall  try  to 
be  a  schoolmaster.  I  shall  hate  it  most  of  the  time,  but  then 
I  hate  most  things.  ..." 

But  Wilmington  never  became  a  schoolmaster.  He  got  a 
battery  of  six-inch  guns  just  before  the  Somme  push  in  1916, 
and  he  went  forward  with  them  into  positions  he  chose 
and  built  up  very  carefully,  only  to  be  shifted  against  his 
wishes  almost  at  once  to  a  new  and,  he  believed,  an  alto- 
gether inferior  position.  He  was  blown  to  nothingness  by  a 
German  shell  while  he  was  constructing  a  gun  pit. 


§  6 

Wilmington  was  not  the  first  of  Joan's  little  company  to 
be  killed.  Joan  had  the  gift  of  friendship.  She  was  rare 
among  girls  in  that  respect.  She  was  less  of  an  artist  in 
egotism  than  most  of  her  contemporaries;  there  were  even 
times  when  she  could  be  self-forgetful  to  the  pitch  of  un- 
tidiness. Two  other  among  that  handful  of  young  soldiers 


468  JOAN  AND  PETER 

who  were  killed  outright  and  who  had  been  her  friends,  wrote 
to  her  with  some  regularity  right  up  to  the  times  of  their 
deaths,  and  found  a  comfort  in  doing  so.  They  wrote  to 
her  at  first  upon  neat  notepaper  adorned  with  regimental 
crests,  but  their  later  letters  as  they  worked  their  slow  pas- 
sages towards  the  place  of  death  were  pencilled  on  thin  paper. 
She  kept  them  all.  She  felt  she  could  have  been  a  good 
sister  to  many  brothers. 

One  of  these  two  who  died  early  was  Winterbaum.  She 
did  not  hear  from  this  young  man  of  the  world  for  some 
weeks  after  the  declaration  of  war.  Then  came  a  large 
photograph  of  himself  in  cavalry  uniform,  and  a  manly, 
worldly  letter  strongly  reminiscent  of  Kipling  and  anticipa- 
tory of  Gilbert  Frankau.  "There  is  something  splendid 
about  this  life  after  all,"  he  wrote.  "It's  good  to  be  without 
one's  little  luxuries  for  a  space,  democratically  undistin- 
guished among  one's  fellows.  It's  good  to  harden  up  until 
nothing  seems  able  to  bruise  one  any  more.  I  bathed  yester- 
day, without  water,  Joan — just  a  dry  towel,  and  that  not  over 
clean — was  all  that  was  available.  After  this  is  all  over  I 
shall  have  such  an  appetite  for  luxury — I  shall  be  fierce, 
Joan." 

Those  early  days  were  still  days  of  unrestricted  plenty, 
and  the  disposition  of  the  British  world  was  to  pet  and 
indulge  everything  in  khaki.  Young  Winterbaum  wore  his 
spurs  and  the  most  beautiful  riding-breeches  to  night  clubs 
and  great  feasts  in  the  more  distinguished  restaurants.  He 
took  his  car  about  with  him,  his  neat  little  black-and-white 
car,  fitted  with  ivory  fopperies.  He  tried  hard  to  take  it 
with  him  to  France.  From  France  his  scribbled  letters  be- 
came more  and  more  heroic  in  tone.  "Poor  David  has  been 
done  in,"  he  said.  "I  am  now  only  three  from  the  Contango 
peerage.  Heaven  send  I  get  no  nearer!  No  Feudal  digni- 
ties for  me.  I  would  give  three  gilded  chambers  at  any 
time  for  one  reasonably  large  and  well-lit  studio.  And — I 
have  a  kind  of  affection  for  my  cousins." 

His  prayer  was  answered.  He  got  no  nearer  to  the  Con- 
tango peerage.  The  powers  above  him  decided  that  a  little 
place  called  Loos  was  of  such  strategic  value  to  the  British 
army  as  to  be  worth  the  lives  of  a  great  number  of  young 


469 

men,  and  paid  in  our  generous  British  fashion  even  more 
than  the  estimate.  Winterbaum  was  part  of  the  price.  No 
particulars  of  his  death  ever  came  to  Joan  and  Peter.  The 
attack  began  brightly,  and  then  died  away.  There  was  a 
failure  to  bring  up  reserves  and  grasp  opportunity.  Winter- 
baum  vanished  out  of  life  in  the  muddle — one  of  thousands. 
He  was  the  first  of  the  little  company  of  Joan's  friends  to 
be  killed. 

Bunny  Cuspard  spread  a  less  self-conscious,  more  western, 
and  altogether  more  complicated  psychology  before  Joan's 
eyes.  Like  Wilmington  he  had  faltered  at  the  outset  of  the 
war  between  enlistment  and  extreme  pacifism,  but  unlike 
Wilmington  he  had  never  reconciled  himself  to  his  decision. 
Bunny  was  out  of  sympathy  with  the  fierceness  of  mankind ; 
he  wanted  a  kindly,  prosperous,  rather,  funny  world  where 
there  is  nothing  more  cruel  than  gossip ;  that  was  the  world 
he  was  fitted  for.  He  repeated  in  his  own  person  and  quality 
the  tragedy  of  Anatole  France.  He  wanted  to  assure  the 
world  and  himself  that  at  heart  everything  was  quite  right 
and  magnificent  fun,  to  laugh  gaily  at  everything,  seeing 
through  its  bristling  hostilities  into  the  depth  of  genial  ab- 
surdity beneath. 

And  so  often  he  could  find  no  genial  absurdity. 

He  had  always  pretended  that  discovering  novel  sorts  of 
cakes  for  his  teas  or  new  steps  for  dances  was  the  really 
serious  business  of  life.  One  of  his  holiday  amusements  had 
been  "Little  Wars,"  which  he  played  with  toy  soldiers  and 
little  model  houses  and  miniature  woods  of  twigs  and  hills 
of  boarding  in  a  big  room  at  his  Limpsfield  home.  He  would 
have  vacation  parties  for  days  to  carry  out  these  wars,  and 
he  and  his  guests  conducted  them  with  a  tremendous  serious- 
ness. He  had  elaborated  his  miniature  battle  scenery  more 
and  more,  making  graveyards,  churches,  inns,  walls,  fences — 
even  sticking  absurd  notices  and  advertisements  upon  the 
walls,  and  writing  epitaphs  upon  his  friends  in  the  grave- 
yard. He  had  loved  the  burlesque  of  it.  He  had  felt  that 
it  brought  history  into  a  proper  proportion  to  humour.  But 
one  of  the  drawbacks  had  always  been  that  as  the  players  lay 
upon  the  floor  to  move  their  soldiers  and  guns  about  they 
crushed  down  his  dear  little  toy  houses  and  woods.  . 


470  JOAN  AND  PETER 

His  mind  still  fought  desperately  to  see  the  war  as  a  min- 
iature. 

He  got  to  a  laugh  ever  and  again  by  a  great  effort,  but 
some  of  the  things  that  haunted  his  imagination  would  not 
under  any  circumstances  dissolve  in  laughter.  Things  that 
other  people  seemed  to  hear  only  to  dismiss  remained  to  sup- 
purate in  his  mind.  One  or  two  of  the  things  that  were  most 
oppressive  to  him  he  never  told  Joan.  But  she  had  a  glimpse 
now  and  then  of  what  was  there,  through  the  cracks  in  his 
laughter. 

He  had  heard  a  man  telling  a  horrible  story  of  the  open- 
ing bombardment  of  Ypres  by  the  Germans.  The  core 
of  the  story  was  a  bricked  tunnel  near  the  old  fortifications  of 
the  town,  whither  a  crowd  of  refugees  had  fled  from  the 
bombardment,  and  into  which  a  number  of  injured  people 
had  been  carried.  A  shell  exploded  near  the  exit  and  im- 
prisoned all  those  people  in  a  half-light  without  any  pro- 
visions or  help.  There  was  not  even  drinking-water  for 
the  wounded.  A  ruptured  drain  poured  a  foul  trickle  across 
the  slimy  floor  on  which  the  wounded  and  exhausted  lay. 
Now  quite  near  and  now  at  a  distance  the  shells  were  still 
bursting,  and  through  that  thudding  and  uproar,  above  all 
the  crouching  and  murmuring  distresses  of  that  pit  of  misery 
sounded  the  low,  clear,  querulous  voice  of  a  little  girl  who 
was  talking  as  she  died,  talking-endlessly  of  how  she  suffered, 
of  how  her  sister  could  not  come  to  help  her,  of  her  desire 
to  be  taken  away ;  a  little,  scoldin^  indignant  spirit  she  was, 
with  a  very  clear  explicit  sense  of  the  vast  impropriety  of 
everything  about  her. 

"Why  does  not  some  one  come?" 

"Be  tranquil,"  an  old  woman's  voice  remonstrated  time 
after  time.  "Help  will  come." 

But  for  most  of  the  people  in  the  tunnel  help  never  came. 
Through  a  slow,  unhurrying  night  of  indescribable  pain  and 
discomfort,  in  hunger,  darkness,  and  an  evil  stench,  their 
lives  ebbed  away  one  by  one.  .  .  . 

That  dark,  dreadful,  stinking  place,  quivering  to  the  in- 
cessant thunder  of  guns,  sinking  through  twilight  into  night, 
lit  by  flashes  and  distant  flames,  and  passing  through  an 
eternity  of  misery  to  a  cold,  starving  dawn,  threaded  by  the 


471 

child's  shrill  voice,  took  a  pitiless  grip  upon  Bunny's  imagin- 
ation. He  could  neither  mitigate  it  nor  forget  it. 

How  could  one  laugh  at  the  Kaiser  with  this  rankling  in 
his  mind?  He  could  not  fit  it  into  any  merry  scheme  of 
things,  and  he  could  not  bear  any  scheme  that  was  not  merry ; 
and  not  to  be  able  to  lit  dreadful  things  into  a  scheme  that 
does  at  last  prevail  over  them  was,  for  such  a  mind  as 
Bunny's,  to  begin  to  drift  from  sanity. 

The  second  story  that  mutely  reinforced  the  shrill  indict- 
ment of  that  little  Belgian  girl  was  a  description  he  had 
heard  of  some  poor  devil  being  shot  for  cowardice  at  dawn. 
A  perplexed,  stupid  youth  of  two-  or  three-and-tvventy,  with 
little  golden  hairs  that  gleamed  on  a  pallid  cheek,  was  led 
out  to  a  heap  of  empty  ammunition  boxes  in  a  desolate  and 
mutilated  landscape  of  mud  and  splintered  trees  under  a 
leaden  sky,  and  set  down  on  a  box  to  die.  It  was  as  if  Bunny 
had  seen  that  living  body  with  his  own  eyes,  the  body  that 
jumped  presently  to  the  impact  of  the  bullets  and  lurched 
forward,  and  how  the  officer  in  command — who  had  been  him- 
self but  a  little  child  in  a  garden  a  dozen  years  or  more  ago — 
came  up  to  the  pitiful  prostrate  form  and  put  his  revolver  to 
the  head  behind  the  ear  that  would  never  hear  again  and 
behind  the  eye  that  stared  and  glazed,  and  pulled  the  trigger 
"to  make  sure." 

Bunny  could  feel  that  revolver  behind  his  own  ear.  It 
felt  as  a  dental  instrument  feels  in  the  mouth. 

"Oh,  my  God!"  cried  Bunny;  "oh,  my  God!"  starting  up 
from  his  sack  of  straw  on  the  floor  in  his  billet  in  the  middle 
of  the  night. 

"Oh!  shut  it!"  said  the  man  who  was  trying  to  sleep  be- 
side him. 

"Sorry !"  said  Bunny. 

"You  keep  it  for  the  Germans,  mate." 

"Oh!  Oh!  If  I  could  kill  this  damned  Kaiser  with  ten 
thousand  torments!"  whispered  Bunny,  quieting  down.  .  .  . 

These  were  not  the  only  stories  that  tormented  Bunny's 
mind,  but  they  were  the  chief  ones.  Others  came  in  and 
went  again — stories  of  the  sufferings  of  wounded  men,  of  al- 
most incredible  brutalities  done  to  women  and  children  and 
helpless  people,  and  of  a  hundred  chance  reasonless  horrors ; 


472  JOAN  AND  PETER 

they  came  in  with  an  effect  of  support  and  confirmation  to 
these  two  principal  figures — the  shrill  little  girl  making  her 
bitter  complaint  against  God  and  the  world  which  had  prom- 
ised to  take  care  of  her,  and  had  scared  her  horribly  and 
torn  her  limbs  and  thrust  her,  thirsty  and  agonized,  into 
a  stinking  drain  to  die ;  and  the  poor  puzzled  lout,  caught  and 
condemned,  who  had  to  die  so  dingily  and  submissively  be- 
cause his  heart  had  failed  him.  Against  the  grim  instances 
of  their  sombre  and  squalid  fates  the  soul  of  Bunny  battled 
whenever,  by  night  or  day,  thought  overtook  him  in  his  essen- 
tial and  characteristic  resolve  to  see  life  as  "fun" — as  "great 
fun." 

These  two  fellow-sufferers  in  life  took  possession  of  his 
imagination  because  of  their  intense  kindred  with  himself. 
So  far  as  he  got  his  riddle  clear  it  was  something  after  this 
fashion:  "Why,  if  the  world  is  like  this,  why  are  we  in  it? 
What  am  I  doing  in  this  nightmare?  Why  are  there  little 
girls  and  simple  louts — and  me?" 

The  days  drew  near  when  he  would  have  to  go  to  the  front. 
He  wrote  shamelessly  to  Joan  of  his  dread  of  that  experience. 

"It's  the  mud  and  dirtiness  and  ugliness,"  he  said.  "1 
am  a  domestic  cat,  Joan — an  indoor  cat.  .  .  . 

"I've  got  a  Pacifist  temperament.  .  .  . 

"All  the  same,  Joan,  the  (Germans  started  this  war.  If  we 
don't  beat  them,  they  will  start  others.  They  are  intolerable 
brutes — the  Junkers,  anyhow.  Until  we  get  them  down  they 
will  go  on  kicking  mankind  in  the  stomach.  It  is  their  idea 
of  digni/ied  behaviour.  But  we  are  casting  our  youth  before 
swine.  .  .  .  Why  aren't  there  more  assassins  in  the  world f 
Why  can't  we  kill  them  by  machinery — painlessly  and 
cleanly?  We  ought  to  be  cleverer  than  they  are." 

There  was  extraordinarily  little  personal  fear  in  Bunny. 
He  was  not  nearly  so  afraid  of  the  things  that  would  happen 
to  him  as  of  the  things  that  would  happen  about  him.  lie 
hated  the  smashing  even  of  inanimate  things;  a  broken-down 
chair  or  a  roofless  shed  was  painful  to  him.  Whenever  he 
thought  of  the  trenches  he  thought  of  treading  and  slipping 
in  the  dark  on  a  torn  and  still  living  body.  .  .  . 

He  stuck  stoutly  to  his  reasoning  that  England  had  to  fight 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      473 

and  that  he  had  to  tight ;  but  hidden  from  Joan,  hidden  from 
every  living  soul,  he  kept  a  secret  resolve.  It  was,  he  knew, 
an  entirely  illogical  and  treasonable  resolve,  and  yet  he  found 
it  profoundly  comforting.  He  would  never  fire  his  rifle  so 
that  it  would  hurt  any  one  even  by  chance,  and  he  would 
never  use  his  bayonet.  lie  would  go  over  the  top  with  the 
best  of  them,  and  carry  his  weapons  and  shout. 

If  it  came  to  close  fighting  he  would  go  for  a  man  with 
his  hands  and  try  to  disarm  him. 

But  this  resolve  was  never  put  to  the  test.  The  Easter 
newspapers  of  1916  arrived  with  flaming  headlines  about  an 
insurrection  in  Dublin  and  the  seizure  of  the  Post  Office  by 
the  rebels.  Oddly  enough,  this  did  not  shock  Bunny  at  all. 
It  produced  none  of  the  effect  of  horror  and  brutality  that 
the  German  invasion  of  Belgium  had  made  upon  his  mind. 
It  impressed  him  as  a  "rag";  as  the  sort  of  rag  that  they 
got  up  to  at  Cambridge  during  seasons  of  excitement.  He- 
was  delighted  by  the  seizure  of  the  Post  Office,  by  the  appear- 
ance of  a  revolutionary  flag  and  the  issue  of  Republican 
stamps.  It  was  as  good  as  "Little  Wars";  it  was  "Little 
Revolutions. "  He  didn't  like  the  way  they  had  shot  a  police- 
man outside  Trinity  College,  but  perhaps  that  report  wasn't 
true.  The  whole  affair  had  restored  that  flavour  of  adven- 
ture and  burlesque  that  he  had  so  sadly  missed  from  the 
world  since  the  war  began. 

He  had  always  idealized  the  Irish  character  as  the  pleasant- 
est  combination  of  facetiousness  and  generosity.  When  he 
found  himself  part  of  a  draft  crossing  to  Dublin  with  his 
back  to  the  grim  war  front,  his  spirits  rose.  He  could  forget 
that  nightmare  for  a  time.  He  was  going  to  a  land  of  wit 
and  laughter  which  had  rebelled  for  a  lark.  He  felt  sure 
that  the  joke  would  end  happily  and  that  he  would  be  shaking 
hands  with  congenial  spirits  still  wearing  Sinn  Fein  badges 
before  a  fortnight  was  out.  Perhaps  he  would  come  upon 
Mrs.  O'Grady  or  Patrick  Lynch,  whom  he  had  been  accus- 
tomed to  meet  at  the  Sheldricks'.  He  had  heard  they  were 
in  it.  And  when  the  whole  business  had  ended  brightly  and 
cheerfully  then  all  those  clever  and  witty  people  would  grow 
grave  and  helpful,  and  come  back  with  him  to  join  in  that 


474  JOAN  AND  PETER 

temporarily  neglected  task  of  fighting  on  the  western  front 
against  an  iron  brutality  that  threatened  to  overwhelm  the 
world. 

He  was  still  in  this  cheerful  vein  two  days  later  as  he  was 
crossing  St.  Stephen's  Green.  His  quaint,  amiable  face  was 
smiling  pleasantly  and  he  was  marching  with  a  native  un- 
gainliness  that  no  drill-sergeant  could  ever  overcome,  when 
something  hit  him  very  hard  in  the  middle  of  the  body. 

He  knew  immediately  that  he  had  been  shot. 

He  was  not  dismayed  or  shocked  by  this,  but  tremendously 
interested. 

All  other  feelings  were  swamped  in  his  surprise  at  a  curious 
contradiction.  He  had  felt  hit  behind,  he  was  convinced 
he  had  been  hit  behind,  but  what  was  queer  about  it  was  that 
he  was  spinning  round  as  though  he  had  been  hit  in  front. 
It  gave  him  a  preposterous  drunken  feeling.  His  head  was 
quite  clear,  but  he  was  altogether  incapable  of  controlling 
these  spinning  legs  of  his,  which  were  going  round  backward. 
His  facile  sense  of  humour  was  aroused.  It  was  really  quite 
funny  to  be  spinning  backwards  in  this  way.  It  was  like  a 
new  step  in  dancing.  His  hilarity  increased.  It  was  like 
the  maddest  dancing  they  had  ever  had  at  Hampstead  or 
Chelsea.  The  ''backwards  step."  He  laughed.  He  had  to 
laugh ;  something  was  tickling  his  ribs  and  throat.  His  whole 
being  laughed.  He  laughed  a  laugh  that  became  a  rush  of 
hot  blood  from  his  mouth.  .  .  . 

The  soul  of  Bunny,  for  all  I  know,  laughs  for  ever  among 
the  stars;  but  it  was  a  dead  young  man  who  finished  those 
fantastic  gyrations. 

He  paused  and  swayed  and  dropped  like  an  empty  sack, 
and  lay  still  in  St.  Stephen's  Green,  the  modest  contribution 
of  one  happy  Sinn  Fein  sniper  to  the  Peace  of  Mankind. 

Perhaps  Bunny  was  well  out  of  a  life  where  there  can  be 
little  room  for  Bunnyism  for  many  years  to  come,  and  lucky 
to  leave  it  laughing.  And  as  an  offset  to  his  loss  we  have  to 
count  the  pleasant  excitement  of  Ireland  in  getting  well  back 
into  the  limelight  of  the  world's  affairs,  and  the  bright  and 
glowing  gathering  of  the  armed  young  heroes  who  got  away, 
recounting  their  deeds  to  one  another  simultaneously  in  some 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      475 

secure  place,  with  all  the  rich,  tumultuous  volubility  of  the 
Keltic  habit. 

''Did  ye  see  that  red-haired  fella  I  got  iu  the  square,  boys? 
.  .  .  Ah,  ye  should  have  seen  that  fella  I  got  in  the  square. ' ' 


§  7 

But  not  all  the  world  of  Joan  was  at  war.  The  Sheldrick 
circle,  for  example,  after  some  wide  fluctuations  during  which 
Sydney  almost  became  a  nurse  and  Babs  nearly  enlisted  into 
the  Women's  Legion,  took  a  marked  list  under  the  influence 
of  one  of  the  sons-in-law  towards  pacifism.  Antonia,  who 
had  taken  two  German  prizes  at  school,  was  speedily  provoked 
by  the  general  denunciation  of  "Kultur"  into  a  distinctly 
pro-German  attitude.  The  Sheldrick  circle  settled  down  on 
the  whole  as  a  pro-German  circle,  with  a  poor  opinion  of 
President  Wilson,  a  marked  hostility  to  Belgians,  and  a  dis- 
position to  think  the  hardships  of  drowning  by  U-boats  much 
exaggerated. 

The  Sheldricks  were  like  seedlings  that  begin  flourishing 
and  then  damp  off.  From  amusing  schoolfellows  they  had 
changed  into  irritating  and  disappointing  friends.  Energy 
leaked  out  of  them  at  adolescence.  They  seemed  to  possess 
the  vitality  for  positive  convictions  no  longer,  they  displayed 
an  instinctive  hostility  to  any  wave  of  popular  feeling  that 
threatened  to  swamp  their  weak  but  still  obstinate  individu- 
alities. Their  general  attitude  towards  life  was  one  of  pro- 
testing refractoriness.  Whatever  it  was  that  people  believed 
or  did,  you  were  given  to  understand  by  undertones  and  ab- 
stinencies  that  the  Sheldricks  knew  better,  and  for  the  most 
exquisite  reasons  didn't.  All  their  friends  were  protesters 
and  rebels  and  seceders,  or  incomprehensible  poets  or  in- 
explicable artists.  And  from  the  first  the  war  was  alto- 
gether too  big  and  strong  for  them.  Confronted  by  such 
questions  as  whether  fifty  years  of  belligerent  preparation, 
culminating  in  the  most  cruel  and  wanton  invasion  of  a 
peaceful  country  it  is  possible  to  imagine,  was  to  be  resisted 
by  mankind  or  condoned,  the  Sheldricks  fell  back  upon  the 


476  JOAN  AND  PETER 

counter  statement  that  Sir  Edward  Grey,  being  a  landowner, 
was  necessarily  just  as  bad  as  a  German  Junker,  or  that  the 
Government  of  Russia  was  an  unsatisfactory  one. 

In  a  few  months  it  was  perfectly  clear  to  the  Sheldricks 
that  they  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  war  at  all. 
They  were  going  to  ignore  it.  Sydney  just  went  on  quietly 
doing  her  little  statuettes  that  nobody  would  buy,  little  por- 
trait busts  of  her  sisters  and  such-like  things ;  now  and  then 
her  mother  contrived  to  get  her  a  commission.  Babs  kept 
on  trying  to  get  a  part  in  somebody's  play;  Antonia  con- 
tinued to  produce  djibbahs  in  chocolate  and  grocer's  blue  and 
similar  tints.  One  saw  the  sisters  drifting  about  London  in 
costumes  still  trailingly  pre-Raphaelite  when  all  the  rest  of 
womankind  was  cutting  its  skirts  shorter  and  shorter,  their 
faces  rather  pained  in  expression  and  deliberately  serene, 
ignoring  the  hopes  and  fears  about  them,  the  stir,  the  huge 
effort,  the  universal  participation.  It  was  not  their  affair, 
thank  you.  They  were  not  going  to  wade  through  this  horrid 
war ;  they  were  going  round. 

Every  time  Joan  went  to  see  them,  either  they  had  become 
more  phantomlike  and  incredible,  or  she  had  become  coarser 
and  more  real.  Would  they  ever  get  round?  she  asked  her- 
self; and  what  would  they  be  like  when  at  last  they  at- 
tempted, if  ever  they  attempted,  to  rejoin  the  main  stream  of 
human  interests  again? 

They  kept  up  their  Saturday  evenings,  but  their  gatherings 
became  thinner  and  less  and  less  credible  as  the  war  went 
on.  The  first  wave  of  military  excitement  carried  oil'  most  of 
the  sightly  young  men,  and  presently  the  more  capable  and 
enterprising  of  the  women  vanished  one  after  another  to 
nurse,  to  join  the  Women's  Legion,  to  become  substitute  clerks 
and  release  men  to  volunteer,  to  work  in  canteens  and  so  forth. 
There  was,  however,  a  certain  coining  and  going  of  ambiguous 
adventurers,  who  in  those  early  days  went  almost  unchal- 
lenged between  London  and  Belgium  on  ambulance  work,  on 
mysterious  missions  and  with  no  missions  at  all.  Belgian 
refugees  drifted  in  and,  when  they  found  a  lack  of  sympathy 
for  their  simple  thirst  for  the  destruction  of  Germans  under 
all  possible  circumstances,  out  agaie.  Then  Ireland  called 
her  own,  and  Patrick  Lynch  went  off  to  die  a  martyr's  death 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      477 

•with  arms  in  his  hands  after  three  days  of  the  most  exhilarat- 
ing mixed  shooting  in  the  streets  of  Dublin.  Antonia  dis- 
covered passionate  memories  as  soon  as  he  was  dead,  and 
nobody  was  allowed  to  mention  the  name  of  Bunny  in  the 
Sheldrick  circle  for  fear  of  spoiling  the  emotional  atmosphere. 
Hetty  Reinhart,  after  some  fluctuations,  went  khaki,  flitted 
from  one  ministry  to  another  in  various  sorts  of  clerical 
capacities,  took  such  opportunities  as  offered  of  entertaining 
young  officers  lonely  in  our  great  capital,  and  was  no  more 
seen  in  Hampstead.  What  was  left  of  this  little  group  in  the 
Hampstead  Quart ier  Latin  drew  together  into  a  band  of  re- 
sistance to  the  creeping  approach  of  compulsory  service. 

Huntley  's  lofty  scorn  of  the  war  had  intensified  steadily ; 
the  harsh  disappointment  of  Joan's  patriotism  had  stung  him 
to  great  efforts  of  self -justification,  arid  he  became  one  of  the 
most  strenuous  writers  in  the  extreme  Pacifist  press.  Not 
an  act  or  effort  of  the  Allies,  he  insisted,  that  was  not  utterly 
vile  in  purpose  and  doomed  to  accelerate  our  defeat.  Not  an 
act  of  the  enemy's  that  was  not  completely  thought  out, 
wisely  calculated,  and  planned  to  give  the  world  peace  and 
freedom  on  the  most  reasonable  terms.  He  was  particularly 
active  in  preparing  handbills  and  pamphlets  of  instruction 
for  life-long  Conscientious  Objectors  to  war  service  who  had 
not  hitherto  thought  about  the  subject.  Community  of  view 
brought  him  very  close  in  feeling  to  both  Babs  and  Sydney 
Sheldrick.  There  was  much  talk  of  a  play  he  was  to  write 
which  was  to  demonstrate  the  absurdity  of  Englishmen  fight- 
ing Germans  just  because  Germans  insisted  upon  fighting 
Englishmen,  and  which  was  also  to  bring  out  the  peculiarly 
charming  Babsiness  of  Babs.  He  studied  her  thoroughly  and 
psychologically  and  physiologically  and  intensively  and  ex- 
tensively. 

By  a  great  effort  of  self-control  he  abstained  from 
sending  his  writings  to  Joan.  Once  however  they  were  near 
meeting.  On  one  of  Joan's  rare  calls  Babs  told  her  that  he 
was  coming  to  discuss  the  question  whether  he  should  go  to 
prison  and  hunger-strike,  or  consent  to  take  up  work  of 
national  importance.  Babs  was  very  full  of  the  case  for  each 
alternative.  She  was  doubtful  which  course  involved  the 
greatest  moral  courage.  Moral  courage,  it  was  evident,  was 


478  JOAN  AND  PETER 

being  carried  to  giddy  heights  by  Huntley.  It  would  be  pure 
hypocrisy,  he  felt,  to  ignore  the  vital  value  of  his  writings, 
and  while  he  could  go  on  with  these  quite  comfortably  while 
working  as  a  farm  hand,  with  a  little  judicious  payment  to 
the  farmer,  their  production  would  become  impossible  in 
prison.  He  must  crucify  himself  upon  the  cross  of  harsh 
judgments,  he  felt,  and  take  the  former  course.  He  wanted 
to  make  his  views  exactly  clear  to  every  one  to  avoid  mis- 
understanding. 

Joan  hesitated  whether  she  should  stay  and  insult  him  or 
go,  and  chose  the  seemlier  course. 


§  8 

Joan  was  already  driving  a  car  for  the  Ministry  of  Muni- 
tions before  Peter  got  himself  transferred  from  the  ranks  of 
the  infantry  to  the  Royal  Flying  Corps.  Peter's  career  as  an 
infantryman  never  took  him  nearer  to  the  western  front 
than  Liss  Forest.  Then  he  perceived  the  error  of  his  ways 
and  decided  to  get  a  commission  in  the  Royal  Flying  Corps. 
In  those  days  the  Flying  Corps  was  still  a  limited  and  inac- 
cessible force  with  a  huge  waiting  list,  and  it  needed  a  con- 
siderable exertion  of  influence  to  secure  a  footing  in  that 
select  band.  .  .  .  But  at  last  a  day  came  when  Peter,  rather 
self-conscious  in  his  new  leather  coat  and  cap,  walked  out 
from  the  mess  past  a  group  of  chatting  young  pilots  towards 
the  aeroplane  in  which  he  was  to  have  his  first  experience  of 
flight. 

He  had  a  sense  of  being  scrutinized,  but  indeed  hardly  any 
one  upon  the  aerodrome  noted  him.  This  sense  of  an  audi- 
ence made  him  deliberately  casual  in  his  bearing.  He 
saluted  his  pilot  in  a  manner  decidedly  offhand.  Pie  clam- 
bered up  through  struts  and  wire  to  the  front  seat  as  if  he 
was  a  clerk  ascending  the  morning  omnibus,  and  strapped 
himself  in  as  if  it  hardly  mattered  whether  he  was  strapped 
in  or  not. 

"Contact,  sir,"  said  the  mechanic.  "Contact,"  came  the 
pilot's  voice  from  behind.  The  engine  roared,  a  gale  swept 
backwards,  and  Peter  vibrated  like  an  aspen  leaf. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      479 

The  wheels  were  cleared,  the  mechanics  jumped  aside,  and 
Peter  was  careering  across  the  grass  in  a  series  of  light  leaps, 
and  then  his  progress  became  smoother.  He  did  not  per- 
ceive at  first  the  reason  for  this  sudden  steadying  of  the  ma- 
chine. He  found  himself  tilting  upward.  He  was  off  the 
ground.  He  had  been  off  the  ground  for  some  seconds.  He 
looked  over  the  side  and  saw  the  grass  iifty  feet  below,  and 
the  black  shadow  of  the  aeroplane,  as  if  it  fled  before  them, 
rushing  at  a  hedge,  doubling  up  at  the  hedge,  and  starting 
again  in  the  next  field.  And  up  he  went. 

Peter  stared  at  fields,  hedges,  trees,  sheds  and  roadways 
growing  small  below  him.  He  noted  cows  in  plan  and  an 
automobile  in  plan,  in  a  lane,  going  it  seemed  very  slowly 
indeed.  It  was  a  stagnant  world  below  in  comparison  with 
his  own  forward  sweep.  His  initial  nervousness  and  self- 
consciousness  had  passed  away.  He  was  enormously  inter- 
ested and  delighted.  He  was  trying  to  remember  when  it  was 
that  Nobby  had  said :  "I  doubt  if  we '11  see  that  in  my  life- 
time— or  yours."  It  was  somewhen  long  ago  at  Limpsfield. 
Quite  early.  .  .  . 

And  then  abruptly  Peter  was  clutching  the  side  with  his 
thick-gloved  hand ;  the  aeroplane  was  coming  round  in  a 
close  curve  and  banking  steeply,  very  steeply.  For  a  mo- 
ment it  seemed  as  though  there  was  nothing  at  all  between 
him  and  England  below.  If  he  fell  out ! 

He  looked  over  his  shoulder  and  met  the  hard  regard  of  a 
pair  of  steel-blue  eyes. 

He  remembered  that  after  all  he  was  under  observation. 
This  was  no  mere  civilian's  joy  ride.  He  affected  a  concen- 
tration upon  the  scenery.  The  aeroplane  swung  slowly  back 
again  to  the  level,  and  his  hand  left  the  side.  .  .  . 

They  were  going  up  very  rapidly  now.  The  world  seemed 
to  be  rolling  in  at  the  edges  of  a  great  circle  that  grew  con- 
stantly larger.  Away  to  the  left  were  broad  spaces  of  brown 
sand,  and  grey  rippled  and  smooth  shining  water  channels, 
and  beyond,  the  sapphire  sea ;  beneath  and  to  the  right  were 
fields,  houses,  villages,  woods,  and  a  distant  range  of  hills 
that  seemed  to  be  coming  nearer.  The  scale  was  changing 
and  everything  was  becoming  maplike.  Cows  were  little  dots 
now  and  men  scarcely  visible.  .  .  .  And  then  suddenly  all 


480  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  scenery  seemed"  to  be  rushing  upward  before  Peter's  eyes 
and  he  had  a  feeling  like  the  feeling  one  has  in  a  lift  when  it 
starts — a  down-borne  feeling.  He  affected  indifference,  and 
gave  the  pilot  his  whistling  profile.  Down  they  swept,  faster 
than  a  luge  on  the  swiftest  ice  run,  until  one  could  see  the 
ditches  in  the  shadows  beneath  the  hedges  and  cows  were 
plainly  cows  again,  and  then  once  more  they  were  heeling 
over  and  curving  round.  But  Peter  had  been  ready  for  "that 
this  time;  he  had  been  telling  himself  over  and  over  again 
that  he  was  strapped  in.  lie  betrayed  no  surprise.  He  was 
getting  more  and  more  exhilarated. 

And  then  they  were  climbing  again  and  soaring  straight 
out  towards  the  sea.  Up  went  this  roaring  dragonfly  in 
which  Peter  was  sitting,  at  a  hundred  and  twenty  miles  or  so 
per  hour,  leaving  the  dwindling  land  behind. 

Up  they  went  and  up,  until  the  world  seemed  nearly  all 
sea  and  the  coast  was  far  away;  they  mounted  at  last  above 
a  little  white  cloud  puff  and  then  above  a  haxe  of  clouds,  and 
when  Peter  looked  down  he  saw  at  a  vast  distance  below, 
through  a  clear  gap  in  that  filmy  cloud  fabric,  three  ships 
smaller  than  any  toys.  Of  the  men  he  could  distinguish 
nothing.  How  sweet  the  cold  clear  air  had  become ! 

And  high  above  the  world,  in  the  lonely  sky  above  the 
cloud  fleece,  the  pilot  saw  fit  to  spring  a  surprise  upon  Peter. 

He  was  not  of  the  genial  and  considerate  order  of  teachers ; 
he  believed  in  weeding  out  duds  as  swiftly  as  possible.  He 
had  an  open  mind  as  to  whether  this  rather  over-intelli<rent- 
looking  beginner  might  not,  under  certain  circumstances, 
squeal.  So  he  just  tried  him  and,  without  a  note  of  prepara- 
tion, looped  the  loop  with  him. 

The  propeller  that  span  before  the  eyes  of  Peter  dipped. 
Peter  bowed  in  accord  with  it.  It  dipped  more  and  more 
steeply,  until  the  machine  was  almost  nose  down,  until  Peter 
was  looking  at  the  sea  and  the  land  as  one  sits  and  looks  at  a 
wall.  He  was  tilted  down  and  down  until  he  was  face  down- 
ward. And  then  as  abruptly  he  was  tilted  up;  it  was  like 
being  in  a  swing;  the  note  of  the  engine  altered  as  if  a  hand 
swept  up  a  scale  of  notes ;  the  sea  and  the  land  seemed  to  fall 
away  below  him  as  though  he  left  them  for  ever,  and  the  blue 
sky  swept  down  across  his  field  of  vision  like  a  curtain:  he 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      481 

was,  so  to  speak,  on  his  back  now  with  his  legs  in  the  air, 
looking  straight  at  the  sky,  at  nothing  but  sky,  and  expecting 
to  recover.  For  a  vast  second  he  waited  for  the  swing  to 
end.  This  was  surely  the  end  of  the  swing.  .  .  . 

Only — most  amazingly — he  didn  't  recover !  He  wanted  to 
say,  "Ouch!"  He  was  immensely  surprised — too  surprised 
to  be  frightened.  He  went  over  backwards — in  an  instant — 
and  the  sea  and  the  land  reappeared  above  the  sky  and  also 
came  down  like  curtains,  too,  and  then  behold !  the  aeroplane 
was  driving  down  and  the  world  was  in  its  place  again  far 
below. 

"The  Loop!"  whispered  Peter,  a  little  dazed,  and  glanced 
back  at  his  pilot  and  smiled.  This  was  no  perambulator  ex- 
cursion. "The  Loop — first  trip!" 

The  blue  eyes  seemed  a  little  less  hard,  the  weather-red  face 
was  smiling  faintly. 

Then  gripped  by  an  irresistible  power,  Peter  found  himself 
going  clown,  down,  down  almost  vertically.  The  pilot  had 
apparently  stopped  the  engine.  .  .  . 

Peter  watched  the  majestic  expansion  of  the  landscape  as 
they  fell.  They  had  come  back  over  the  land.  Far  away 
he  could  see  the  aerodrome  like  a  scattered  collection  of  little 
toy  huts,  and  growing  bigger  and  bigger  every  instant.  He 
sat  quite  still,  for  it  was  all  right — it  must  be  all  right.  But 
now  they  were  getting  very  near  the  ground,  and  it  was  still 
rushing  up  to  meet  them,  and  pouring  outwardly  as  it  rose. 
A  cat  now  would  be  visible.  .  .  . 

It  was  all  right.  The  engine  picked  up  with  a  roar  like  a 
score  of  lions,  and  the  pilot  levelled  out  a  hundred  feet  above 
the  trees.  .  .  . 

Then  presently  they  were  dropping  to  the  aerodrome 
again  ;  down  until  the  hedges  were  plain  and  the  grazing  cat- 
tle close  and  distinct ;  and  then,  with  a  sense  of  infinite  re- 
gret, Peter  perceived  that  they  were  back  on  the  turf  again 
and  that  the  flight  was  over.  They  danced  lightly  over  the 
turf.  Their  rush  slowed  down.  They  taxied  gently  up  to 
the  hangar  and  the  engine  shuddered  and,  with  a  pathetic 
drop  to  silence,  stopped.  .  .  . 

A  little  stiffly,  Peter  unbuckled  himself  and  stretched  and 
set  himself  to  clamber  to  the  ground. 


482  JOAN  AND  PETER 

His  weather-bitten  senior  nodded  to  him  and  smiled 
faintly.  .  .  . 

Peter  walked  towards  the  mess.  It  was  wonderful — and 
intensely  disappointing  in  that  it  was  so  soon  over.  There 
were  still  great  pieces  of  the  afternoon  left.  .  .  . 


§  9 

The  aerodrome  was  short  of  machines  and  instructors,  and 
he  had  to  wait  a  couple  of  weeks  before  he  could  get  into 
the  air  a  second  time. 

He  worked  sedulously  to  gather  knowledge  during  that 
waiting  interval,  and  his  first  real  lesson  found  him  a  very 
alert  and  ready  pupil.  This  time  the  dual  control  was  at  his 
disposal,  and  for  a  straight  or  so  the  pilot  left  things  to  him 
altogether.  Came  half  a  dozen  other  lessons,  and  then  Peter 
found  himself  sitting  alone  in  a  machine  outside  the  great 
sheds,  watched  closely  by  a  knot  of  friendly  rivals,  and,  for 
the  first  time  on  his  own  account,  conducting  that  duologue 
he  had  heard  now  so  often  on  other  lips.  ' '  Switch  off. "... 
" Suck  in."  "Contact!" 

He  started  across  the  ground.  His  first  sensations  bor- 
dered on  panic.  Hitherto  the  machines  he  had  flown  in  had 
been  just  machines;  now  this  one,  this  one  was  an  animal; 
it  started  out  across  the  aerodrome  like  a  demented  ostrich, 
swerving  wildly  and  trying  to  turn  round.  Always  before 
this,  the  other  man  had  done  the  taxi  business  on  the  ground. 
It  had  never  occurred  to  Peter  that  it  involved  any  difficulty. 
Peter's  heart  nearly  failed  him  in  that  opening  twenty  sec- 
onds ;  he  was  convinced  he  was  going  to  be  killed ;  and  then 
he  determined  to  get  up  at  any  cost.  At  any  rate  he  wouldn't 
smash  on  the  ground.  He  let  out  the  accelerator,  touched  his 
controls,  and  behold  he  was  up — he  was  up !  Instantly  the 
machine  ceased  to  resemble  a  floundering  ostrich,  and  became 
a  steady  and  dignified  carinate,  swaying  only  slightly  from 
wing  to  wing.  Up  he  went  over  the  hedges,  over  the  trees, 
beyond,  above  the  familiar  field  of  cows.  The  moment  of 
panic  passed,  and  Peter  was  himself  again. 

He  had  got  right  outside  the  aerodrome  and  he  had  to 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      483 

bank  and  bring  her  round.  Already  he  had  done  that  suc- 
cessfully a  number  of  times  with  an  instructor  to  take  care 
of  him.  He  did  it  successfully  now.  His  confidence  grew. 
Back  he  buzzed  and  droned,  a  hundred  feet  over  the  aero- 
drome. He  made  three  complete  circuits,  rose  outside  the 
aerodrome  and  came  down,  making  a  good  landing.  He  was 
instantly  smitten  with  the  intensest  regret  that  he  had  not 
made  eight  or  nine  circuits.  It  was  a  mere  hop.  Any  man 
of  spirit  would  have  gone  on.  There  were  four  hours  of  day- 
light yet.  He  might  have  gone  up;  he  might  have  tried  a 
spiral.  .  .  .  Damn! 

But  the  blue  eyes  of  the  master  approved  him. 

' '  Couldn  't  have  made  a  better  landing,  Stubland, ' '  said  the 
master.  "Try  again  tomorrow.  Follow  it  up  close.  Short 
and  frequent  doses.  That 's  the  way. ' ' 

Peter  had  made  another  stage  on  his  way  to  France. 

Came  other  solo  flights,  and  flights  on  different  types  of 
machines,  and  then  a  day  of  glory  and  disobedience  when, 
three  thousand  feet  above  the  chimneys  of  a  decent  farm- 
house, Peter  looped  the  loop  twice.  He  had  learnt  by  that 
time  what  it  was  to  sideslip,  and  what  air  pockets  can  do  to 
the  unwary.  He  had  learnt  the  bitter  consequences  of  com- 
ing down  with  the  engine  going  strong.  He  had  had  a  smash 
through  that  all  too  common  mistake,  but  not  a  bad  smash ;  a 
few  struts  and  wires  of  the  left  wing  were  all  that  had  gone. 
A  hedge  and  a  willow  tree  had  stopped  him.  He  had  had  a 
forced  landing  in  a  field  of  cabbages  through  engine  stoppage, 
and  half  an  hour  in  a  snowstorm  when  he  had  had  doubts  in 
an  upward  eddy  whether  he  might  not  be  flying  upside  down. 
That  had  been  a  nasty  experience — his  worst.  He  had  sev- 
eral times  taken  his  hands  off  the  controls  and  let  the  old  'bus 
look  after  herself,  so  badly  were  the  snowflakes  spinning 
about  in  his  mind.  He  dreamt  a  lot  about  flying,  and  few  of 
his  dreams  were  pleasant  dreams.  And  then  this  fantastic 
old  world  of  ours,  which  had  so  suddenly  diverted  his  educa- 
tion to  these  things,  and  taught  him  to  fly  with  a  haste  and 
intensity  it  had  never  put  into  any  teaching  before,  decided 
that  he  was  ripe  for  the  air  war,  and  packed  him  off  to 
France.  . 


484  JOAN  AND  PETER 


§  10 

Now,  seeing  that  Joan  had  at  last  discovered  that  she  was 
in  love  with  Peter,  it  would  be  pleasantly  symmetrical  to 
record  that  Peter  had  also  discovered  by  this  time  that  he  was 
in  love  with  Joan. 

But  as  a  matter  of  fact  he  had  discovered  nothing  of  the 
sort.  He  had  been  amazed  and  humiliated  by  his  three  days 
of  hesitation  and  procrastination  at  Orta ;  the  delay  was  alto- 
gether out  of  keeping  with  his  private  picture  of  himself; 
and  he  discovered  that  he  was  not  in  love  with  any  one  and 
that  he  did  not  intend  again  to  be  lured  into  any  dangerous 
pretence  that  he  was.  He  had  done  with  Hetty,  he  was  con- 
vinced; he  did  not  mean  to  see  her  any  more,  and  he  led  a 
life  of  exasperated  Puritanism  for  some  months,  refusing  to 
answer  the  occasionally  very  skilful  and  perplexing  letters, 
with  amusing  and  provocative  illustrations,  that  she  wrote 
him. 

The  idea  of  " relaxing  moral  fibre"  obsessed  him,  and  our 
genial  Peter  for  a  time  abandoned  both  smoking  and  alcohol, 
and  was  only  deterred  from  further  abstinences  by  their  im- 
practicability. The  ordinary  infantry  mess,  for  example, 
caters  ill  and  resentfully  for  vegetarians.  .  .  .  Peter's  days 
in  the  ranks  were  days  of  strained  austerity.  He  was  a  ter- 
ribly efficient  recruit,  a  fierce  soldier,  a  wonderful  influence 
on  slackers,  stripes  gravitated  towards  him,  and  a  prophetic 
corporal  saw  sergeant-major  written  on  his  forehead.  Occa- 
sionally, when  his  imagination  got  loose  or  after  a  letter  from 
Hetty,  he  would  indulge  privately  in  fits  of  violent  rage, 
finding  great  relief  in  the  smashing  of  light  objects  and  foul 
and  outrageous  language.  He  found  what  he  considered  a 
convenient  privacy  for  this  idiosyncrasy  in  a  disused  cowshed 
near  the  camp,  and  only  realized  that  he  had  an  audience 
when  a  fellow  recruit  asked  anxiously,  "And  how's  Miss 
Blurry  'Etty?"  Whereupon  Peter  discovered  a  better  out- 
let for  pentup  nervous  energy  in  a  square  fight. 

Joan  saw  hardly  anything  of  him  during  those  early  and 
brutal  days,  but  she  thought  about  him  mightily.  She 
shared  Oswald's  opinion  that  he  wasn't  in  his  right  place, 


JOAN  AND  PETEE  GRADUATE      485 

and  she  wrote  to  him  frequently.  He  answered  perhaps  half 
her  letters.  His  answers  struck  her  as  being  rather  posed. 
The  strain  showed  through  them.  Peter  was  trying  very 
hard  not  to  be  Peter.  "I'm  getting  down  to  elemental*,'' 
was  one  of  his  experiments  in  the  statement  of  his  moral 
struggle. 

Then  quite  abruptly  came  his  decision  to  get  into  the 
Royal  Flying  Corps. 

Neither  Oswald  nor  Joan  ventured  any  comment  on  this, 
because  both  of  them  had  a  feeling  that  Peter  had,  in  a 
sense,  climbed  down  by  this  decision  to  go  up.  .  .  . 

In  the  Royal  Flying  Corps  Peter's  rather  hastily  conceived 
theories  of  moral  fibre  came  into  an  uncongenial  atmosphere. 
The  Royal  Flying  Corps  was  amazingly  young,  swift,  and 
confident,  and  "moral  fibre"  based  on  abstinence  and  cold 
self-control  was  not  at  all  what  it  was  after.  The  Royal 
Flying  Corps  was  much  more  inclined  to  scrap  with  soda- 
water  syphons  and  rag  to  the  tunes  of  a  irramophone.  It 
was  a  body  that  had  had  to  improvise  a  tradition  of  conduct 
in  three  or  four  swift  years,  and  its  tradition  was  still  un- 
stable. Mainly  it  was  the  tradition  of  the  games  and  sports 
side  of  a  public  school,  roughly  adapted  to  the  new  needs  of 
the  service ;  it  was  an  essentially  boyish  tradition,  even  men 
old  enough  to  have  gone  through  the  universities  were  in  a 
minority  in  it,  and  Peter  at  one-and-twenty  was  one  of  the 
more  elderly  class  of  recruits.  And  necessarily  the  tradition 
of  the  corps  still  varied  widely  with  the  dominant  person- 
alities and  favourite  heroes  of  each  aerodrome  and  mess  and 
squadron.  It  was  a  crowd  of  plastic  boys,  left  amazingly  to 
chance  leads.  Their  seniors  had  no  light  for  them,  and  they 
picked  up  such  hints  as  they  could  from  Kipling  and  the 
music-halls,  from  overheard  conversations,  and  one  another. 

Is  it  not  an  incredible  world  in  which  old  men  make  wars 
and  untutored  young  men  have  to  find  out  how  to  fight  them ; 
in  which  tradition  and  the  past  are  mere  entanglements  about 
the  feet  of  the  young?  The  flying  services  took  the  very 
flower  of  the  youth  of  the  belligerent  nations ;  they  took  the 
young  men  who  were  most  manifestly  fitted  to  be  politicians, 
statesmen,  leaders  of  men,  masters  in  industry,  and  makers 
of  the  new  age ;  the  boys  of  nerve,  pluck,  imagination,  inven- 


486  JOAN  AND  PETER 

tion,  and  decision.  And  there  is  not  a  sign  of  any  realization 
on  the  part  of  any  one  of  the  belligerent  states  of  the  fact  that 
a  large  proportion  of  this  most  select  and  valuable  mass  of 
youth  was  destined  to  go  on  living  after  the  war  and  was 
going  to  matter  tremendously  and  be  the  backbone  of  the 
race  after  the  war.  They  let  all  these  boys  specialize  as 
jockeys  specialize.  The  old  men  and  rulers  wanted  these 
youngsters  to  fight  and  die  for  them;  that  any  future  lay 
beyond  the  war  was  too  much  for  these  scared  and  unteach- 
able  ancients  to  apprehend.  The  short  way  to  immediate 
efficiency  was  to  back  the  tradition  of  recklessness  and  gal- 
lantry, and  so  the  short  way  was  taken ;  if  the  brave  lads  were 
kept  bold  and  reckless  by  women,  wine  and  song,  then  by  all 
means,  said  their  elders,  let  them  have  these  helps.  "A  short 
life  and  a  merry  one,"  said  the  British  Empire  to  these  lads 
of  eighteen  and  nineteen  encouragingly.  "A  short  life  and 
a  merry  one,"  said  the  Empire  to  its  future. 

If  the  story  of  the  air  forces  is  a  glorious  and  not  a  shame- 
ful thing  it  is  because  of  the  enduring  hope  of  the  world — 
the  incessant  gallantry  of  youth.  These  boys  took  up  their 
great  and  cardinal  task  with  the  unquenchable  hopefulness 
of  boyhood  and  with  the  impudence  and  humour  of  their  race. 
They  brought  in  the  irreverence  and  the  Spartan  ism  of  their 
years.  They  made  a  language  for  themselves,  an  atrocious 
slang  of  facetious  misnomers;  everything  one  did  was  a 
' '  stunt ' ' ;  everything.one  used  was  a  ' '  gadget ' ' ;  the  machines 
were  "'buses"  and  "camels"  and  "pups";  the  older  men 
were  perpetually  pleading  in  vain  for  more  dignity  in  the 
official  reports.  And  these  youngsters  worked  out  their 
moral  problems  according  to  their  own  generous  and  yet 
puerile  ideas.  They  argued  the  question  of  drink.  Could 
a  man  fly  better  or  worse  if  he  was  "squiffy"?  Does  funk 
come  to  the  thoughtful  ?  And  was  ever  a  man  gallant  with- 
out gallantries?  After  the  death  of  Lord  Kitchener  there 
survived  no  man  in  Britain  of  the  quality  to  speak  plainly 
and  authoritatively  and  honestly  about  chastity  and  drink  to 
the  young  soldier.  The  State  had  no  mind  in  these  matters. 
In  most  matters  indeed  the  State  had  no  mind :  it  was  a  little 
old  silly  State.  And  the  light  side  of  the  feminine  tempera- 
ment flamed  up  into  shameless  acquiescences  in  the  heroic 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      487 

presence  of  the  flying  man.  Youth  instinctively  sets  towards 
romantic  adventures,  and  the  scales  of  chance  for  a  consider- 
able number  of  the  flying  men  swung  between  mesalliance  and 
Messalina. 

The  code  and  the  atmosphere  varied  from  mess  to  mess 
and  from  squadron  to  squadron;  young  men  are  by  nature 
and  necessity  hero- worshippers  and  imitative.  Peter's  lines 
fell  among  pleasant  men  of  the  ' '  irresponsible ' '  school.  The 
two  best  flyers  he  knew,  including  him  of  the  hard  blue  eyes 
who  had  first  instructed  him,  were  men  of  a  physique  that 
defied  drink  and  dissipation.  Vigours  could  smoke,  drink, 
and  dance  in  London,  catch  the  last  train  back  with  three 
seconds  to  spare,  and  be  flying  with  an  unshaken  nerve  by 
half -past  six  in  the  morning;  Vincent  would  only  perform 
stunts  when  he  was  "tight,"  and  then  he  seemed  capable  of 
taking  any  risk  with  impunity.  He  could  be  funny  with  an 
aeroplane  then  a  thousand  feet  up  in  the  air.  He  could  make 
it  behave  as  though  it  was  drunk,  as  though  it  was  artful ; 
he  could  make  it  mope  or  wag  its  tail.  Men  went  out  to  watch 
him.  The  mess  was  decorated  with  pictures  from  La  Vie 
Parisienne,  and  the  art  and  literature  of  the  group  was 
Revue.  Now  seeing  that  Peter's  sole  reason  for  his  puritan- 
ism  was  the  preservation  of  efficiency,  this  combination  of  a 
fast  life  and  a  fine  record  in  the  air  was  very  disconcerting 
to  him. 

If  he  had  been  naturally  and  easily  a  first-class  flying  man 
he  might  have  stuck  to  his  line  of  high  austerity,  but  he  was 
not.  He  flew  well,  but  he  had  to  fly  with  care;  like  many 
other  airmen,  he  always  felt  a  shadow  of  funk  before  going 
up,  on  two  or  three  bad  mornings  it  was  on  his  conscience 
that  he  had  delayed  for  ten  minutes  or  so,  and  he  was  more 
and  more  inclined  to  think  that  he  would  fly  better  if  he  flew 
with  a  less  acute  sense  of  possibilities.  It  was  the  start  and 
the  uneventful  flying  that  irked  him  most;  hitherto  every 
crisis  had  found  him  cool  and  able.  But  the  slap-dash  style, 
combined  with  the  exquisite  accuracy  of  these  rakes,  Vigours 
and  Vincent,  filled  him  with  envious  admiration. 

In  the  mess  Peter  met  chiefly  youths  of  his  own  age  or  a 
year  or  so  younger;  he  soon  became  a  master  of  slang;  his 
style  of  wit  won  its  way  among  them.  He  ceased  to  write  of 


488  JOAN  AND  PETER 

' '  getting  down  to  elementals ' '  to  Joan,  and  he  ceased  to  think 
of  all  other  girls  and  women  as  inventions  of  the  devil.  Only 
they  must  be  kept  in  their  places.  As  Vigours  and  Vincent 
kept  them.  Just  as  one  kept  drink  in  its  place.  One  must 
not,  for  example,  lose  trains  on  account  of  them.  .  .  . 

Through  these  months  Joan  maintained  a  strained  watch 
upon  the  development  and  fluctuations  of  Peter.  He  wrote 
— variously;  sometimes  offhand  duty  notes  and  sometimes 
long  and  brotherly  letters — incurably  brotherly.  Every  now 
and  then  she  had  glimpses  of  him  when  he  came  to  London 
on  leave.  Manifestly  he  liked  her  company  and  trusted  her 
— as  though  she  was  a  man.  It  was  exasperating.  She 
dressed  for  Peter  as  she  had  never  dressed  for  any  one,  and 
he  would  take  her  out  to  dine  at  the  Eendezvous  or  the  Petit 
Riche  and  sit  beside  her  and  glance  at  common  scraps  of 
feminine  humanity,  at  dirty  little  ogling  bare-throated  girls 
in  patched-up  raiment  and  with  harsh  and  screaming  voices, 
as  though  they  were  the  most  delicious  of  forbidden  fruits. 
And  he  seemed  to  dislike  being  alone  with  her.  If  she 
dropped  her  hand  to  touch  his  on  the  table,  he  would  draw 
his  away. 

Was  the  invisible  barrier  between  them  invincible? 

For  a  time  during  his  infantry  phase  he  had  shown  a 
warm  affection.  In  his  early  days  in  the  flying  corps  it 
seemed  that  he  drew  still  closer  to  her.  Then  her  quick, 
close  watch  upon  him  detected  a  difference.  Joan  was  get- 
ting to  be  a  very  shrewd  observer  nowadays,  and  she  felt  a 
subtle  change  that  suddenly  made  him  a  little  shame-faced  in 
her  presence.  There  had  been  some  sort  of  spree  in  London 
with  two  or  three  other  wild  spirits,  and  there  had  been 
"girls"  in  the  party.  Such  girls!  He  never  told  her  this, 
but  something  told  her.  I  am  inclined  to  think  it  was  her 
acute  sense  of  smell  detected  a  flavour  of  face  powder  or 
cheap  scent  about  Peter  when  he  came  along  one  day,  half 
an  hour  late,  to  take  her  to  the  Ambassadors.  She  was  bad 
company  that  night  for  him. 

For  a  time  Joan  was  bad  company  for  any  one. 

She  was  worse  when  she  realized  that  Hetty  was  somehow 
reinstated  in  Peter's  world.  That,  too,  she  knew  by  an  al- 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      489 

most  incredible  flash  of  intuition.  Miss  Jepson  was  talking 
one  evening  to  Peter,  and  Peter  suddenly  displayed  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  work  of  the  London  Group  that  savoured  of 
studio.  This  was  the  first  art  criticism  he  had  talked  since 
the  war  began.  It  was  clear  he  had  been  to  a  couple  of 
shows.  Not  with  Joan.  Not  alone.  As  he  spoke,  he  glanced 
at  Joan  and  met  her  eye. 

It  was  astonishing  that  Miss  Jepson  never  heard  the  loud 
shout  of  "Hetty"  that  seemed  to  till  the  room. 

It  was  just  after  this  realization  that  an  elderly  but  still 
gallant  colonel,  going  on  an  expedition  for  the  War  Office 
with  various  other  technical  authorities  to  suppress  some 
disturbing  invention  that  the  Ministry  of  Munitions  was 
pressing  in  a  troublesome  manner,  decided  to  come  back  from 
Longmore  to  London  on  the  front  seat  beside  Joan.  His 
conversational  intentions  were  honourable  and  agreeable,  but 
he  shared  a  common  error  that  a  girl  who  wears  khaki  and 
drives  a  car  demands  less  respect  from  old  gentlemen  and  is 
altogether  more  playful  than  the  Victorian  good  woman. 
Possibly  he  was  lured  on  to  his  own  destruction. 

When  he  descended  at  the  Ministry,  he  looked  pinched 
and  aged.  He  was  shaken  to  the  pitch  of  confidences.  "My 
word,"  he  whispered.  "That  girl  drives  like  the  devil.  But 
she's  a  vixen  .  .  .  snaps  your  head  off.  .  .  .  Don't  know 
whether  this  sort  of  thing  is  good  for  women  in  the  long 
run. 

"Robs  'em  of  Charm,"  he  said. 


§  11 

It  was  just  in  this  phase  of  wrath  and  darkness  that  Wil- 
mington came  over  to  London  for  his  last  leave  before  he 
was  killed,  and  begged  Joan  for  all  the  hours  she  had  to 
spare.  She  was  quite  willing  to  treat  him  generously.  They 
dined  together  and  went  to  various  theatres  and  music-halls 
and  had  a  walk  over  Hampstead  Heath  on  Sunday.  He  was 
a  silent,  persistent  companion  for  most  of  the  time.  He 
bored  her,  and  the  more  he  bored  her  the  greater  her  com- 


490  JOAN  AND  PETER 

punction  and  the  more  she  hid  it  from  him.  But  Wilming- 
ton, if  he  had  a  slow  tongue,  had  a  penetrating  eye. 

The  last  evening  they  had  together  was  at  the  Criterion. 
They  dined  in  the  grill  room,  a  dinner  that  was  interspersed 
with  brooding  silences.  And  then  Wilmington  decided  to 
make  himself  interesting  at  any  cost  upon  this  last  occasion. 

"Joan,"  he  said,  knocking  out  a  half-consumed  cigarette 
upon  the  edge  of  his  plate. 

"Billy?"  said  Joan,  waking  up. 

"Queer,  Joan,  that  you  don't  love  me  when  I  love  you  so 
much." 

"I'd  trust  you  to  the  end  of  the  earth,  Billy." 

"I  know.     But  you  don't  love  me." 

' '  I  think  of  you  as  much  as  I  do  of  any  one. ' ' 

"No.     Except— one." 

"Billy,"  said  Joan  weakly,  "you're  the  straightest  man 
on  earth." 

Wilmington's  tongue  ran  along  his  white  lips.  He  spoke 
with  an  effort. 

"You've  loved  Peter  since  you  were  six  years  old.  It 
isn't  as  though — you'd  treated  me  badly.  I  can't  grumble 
that  you've  had  no  room  for  me.  He's  always  been  there." 

Joan,  after  an  interval,  decided  to  be  frank. 

"It's  not  much  good,  Billy,  is  it,  if  I  do?" 

Wilmington  said  nothing  for  quite  a  long  time.  He  sat 
thinking  hard.  "It's  not  much  good  pretending  I  don't 
hate  Peter.  I  do.  If  I  could  kill  him — and  in  your  mem- 
ory too.  .  .  .  He  bars  you  from  me.  He  makes  you  un- 
happy. ..." 

His  face  was  a  white  misery.  Joan  glanced  round  at  the 
tables  about  her,  but  no  one  seemed  to  be  watching  them. 
She  looked  at  him  again.  Pity,  so  great  that  it  came  near 
to  love,  wrung  her.  .  .  . 

"Joan, ' '  he  said  at  last. 

"Yes?" 

"It's  queer.  ...  I  feel  mean.  ...  As  though  it  wasn't 
right.  .  .  .  But  look  here,  Joan."  He  tapped  her  arm. 
"Something — something  that  I  suppose  I  may  as  well  point 
out  to  you.  Because  in  certain  matters — in  certain  matters 

you  are  being  a  fool.  It's  astonishing But  absolutely 

—a  fool." 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      491 

Joan  perceived  he  had  something  very  important  to  say. 
She  sat  watching  him,  as  with  immense  deliberation  he  got 
out  another  cigarette  and  lit  it. 

"You  don't  understand  this  Peter  business,  Joan.  I — 1 
do.  Mostly  when  I  'm  not  actually  planning  out  or  carrying 
out  the  destruction  of  Germans,  I  think  of  you — and  Peter. 
And  all  the  rest  of  it.  I've  got  nothing  else  much  to  think 
about.  And  I  think  I  see  things  you  don't  see.  I  know  I 
do.  ...  Oh  damn  it!  Go  to  hell!" 

This  last  was  to  the  waiter,  who  was  making  the  customary 
warning  about  liqueurs  on  the  stroke  of  half-past  nine. 

"Sorry,"  said  Wilmington  to  Joan,  and  leant  forward 
over  his  folded  arms  and  collected  his  thoughts  with  his  eyes 
on  the  flowers  before  them. 

"It's  like  this,  Joan.  Peter  isn't  where  we  are.  I — I'm 
very  definite  and  clear  about  my  love-making.  I  fell  in  love 
with  you,  and  I  've  never  met  any  other  woman  I  'd  give  three 
minutes  of  my  life  to.  You've  just  got  me.  As  if  I  were 
the  palm  of  your  hand.  I  wish  I  were.  And — oh!  what's 
the  good  of  shutting  my  eyes? — Peter  has  you.  You've  been 
thinking  of  Peter  half  the  time  we've  been  together.  It's 
true,  Joan.  You've  grown  up  in  love.  Buh!  But  Peter, 
you've  got  to  understand,  isn't  in  love.  He  doesn't  know 
what  love  means.  Perhaps  he  never  will.  Love  with  you 
and  me  is  a  thing  of  flesh  and  bone.  He  takes  it  like  some 
skin  disease.  He's  been  spoilt.  He's  so  damned  easy  and 
good-looking.  He  was  got  hold  of.  I " 

Wilmington  flushed  for  a  moment.  "I'm  a  chaste  man, 

Joan.  It's  a  rare  thing.  Among  our  sort.  But  Peter 

Loving  a  woman  body  and  soul  means  nothing  to  him.  He 

thinks  love-making  is  a  kind  of  amusement Casual 

amusement.  Any  woman  who  isn't  repulsive.  You  know, 
Joan,  that's  not  the  natural  way.  The  natural  way  is  love 
of  soul  and  body.  He's  been  perverted.  But  in  this 
crowded  world — like  a  monkey's  cage  .  .  .  artificially  heated 
.  .  .  the  young  men  get  made  miscellaneous.  .  .  .  Lots  of 
the  girls  even  are  miscellaneous.  ..." 

He  considered  the  word.  "Miscellaneous?  Promiscuous, 
I  mean.  ...  It  hasn't  happened  to  us.  To  you  and  me,  I 
mean.  I'm  unattractive  somehow.  You're  fastidious. 


492  JOAN  AND  PETER 

He's  neither.  He  takes  the  thing  that  offers.  To  grave 
people  sex  is  a  sacrament,  something — so  solemn  and  beauti- 
ful  " 

The  tears  stood  in  his  eyes.  "If  I  go  on,"  he  said.  .  .  . 
"I  can't  goon.  .  .  ." 

For  a  time  he  said  no  more,  and  pulled  his  unconsumed 
cigarette  to  pieces  over  the  ash-tray  with  trembling  fingers. 
"That's  all,"  he  said  at  last. 

' '  All  this  is — rather  true, ' '  said  Joan.     ' '  But ! ' ' 

"What  does  it  lead  up  to?" 

"Yes." 

"It  means  Peter's  the  ordinary  male  animal.  Under  mod- 
ern conditions.  Lazy.  Affectionate  and  all  that,  but  not  a 
scrap  of  emotion  or  love — yet  anyhow.  Not  what  you  and  I 
know  as  love.  You  may  dress  it  up  as  you  like,  but  the  fact 
is  that  the  woman  has  to  make  love  to  him.  That's  all. 
Hetty  has  made  love  to  him.  He  has  never  made  love  to 
anybody — except  as  a  sort  of  cheerful  way  of  talking,  and 
perhaps  he  never,  never  will.  .  .  .  He  respects  you  too  much 
to  make  love  to  you.  .  .  .  But  he'd  hate  the  idea  of  any  one 
else — making  love  to  you.  ...  It's  an  idea It's  out- 
side of  his  conception  of  you.  .  .  He'll  never  think  of  it 
for  himself." 

Joan  sat  quite  still.  After  what  seemed  a  long  silence  she 
looked  up  at  him. 

Wilmington  was  watching  her  face.  He  saw  she  under- 
stood his  drift. 

"You  could  cut  her  out  like  that,"  said  Wilmington,  with 
a  gesture  that  gained  an  accidental  emphasis  by  knocking  his 
glass  off  the  table  and  smashing  it. 

The  broken  glass  supplied  an  incident,  a  distraction,  with 
the  waiters,  to  relieve  the  tension  of  the  situation. 

"That's  all  I  had  to  say,"  said  Wilmington  when  that  was 
all  settled.  "There's  no  earthly  reason  why  two  of  us 
should  be  unhappy." 

' '  Billy, ' '  she  said,  after  a  long  pause,  "  if  I  could  only  love 
you- 

The  face  of  gratitude  that  looked  at  him  faded  to  a  mask. 

"You're  thinking  of  Peter  already,"  said  Wilmington, 
watching  her  face. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE 

It  was  true.     She  started,  detected. 

He  speculated  cheerlessly. 

"You'll  marry  me  some  day  perhaps.  When  Peter's 
thrown  you  over.  .  .  .It's  men  of  iny  sort  who  get  things 
like  that.  ..." 

He  stood  up  and  reached  for  her  cloak.  She,  too,  stood 
up. 

Then,  as  if  to  reassure  her,  he  said:  "I  shall  get  killed, 
Joan.  So  we  needn't  worry  about  that.  I  shall  get  killed. 
I  know  it.  And  Peter  will  live.  ...  I  always  have  taken 
everything  too  seriously.  Always.  ...  I  shall  kill  a  lot  of 
Germans  yet,  but  one  day  they  will  get  me.  And  Peter  will 
be  up  there  in  the  air,  like  a  cheerful  midge — with  all  the 
Archies  missing  him. 


§  12 

This  conversation  was  a  cardinal  event  in  Joan's  life. 
"Wilmington's  suggestions  raised  out  of  the  grave  of  forget- 
fulness  and  incorporated  with  themselves  a  conversation  she 
had  had  long  ago  with  Adela — one  Christmas  at  Pelham 
Ford  when  Adela  had  been  in  love  with  Sopwith  Greene. 
Adela  too  had  maintained  that  it  was  the  business  of  a 
woman  to  choose  her  man  and  not  wait  to  be  chosen,  and 
that  it  was  the  woman  who  had  to  make  love.  "A  man's  in 
love  with  women  in  general,"  had  been  Adela 's  idea,  "but 
women  fall  in  love  with  men  in  particular."  Adela  had 
used  a  queer  phrase,  "It's  for  a  woman  to  find  her  own  man 
and  keep  him  and  take  care  of  him."  Men  had  to  do  their 
own  work;  they  couldn't  think  about  love  as  women  were 
obliged  by  nature  to  think  about  love.  "Love's  just  a 
trouble  to  a  real  man,  like  a  mosquito  singing  in  his  ear,  until 
some  woman  takes  care  of  him." 

All  those  ideas  came  back  now  to  Joan's  mind,  and  she 
did  her  best  to  consider  them  and  judge  them  as  generali/.a- 
tions.  But  indeed  she  judged  with  a  packed  court,  and  all 
her  being  clamoured  warmly  for  her  to  "get"  Peter,  to 
"take  care" — most  admirable  phrase — of  Peter.  Her  de- 
cision was  made,  and  still  she  argued  with  herself.  Was  it 
beneath  her  dignity  to  set  out  and  capture  her  Peter? — he 


494  JOAN  AND  PETER 

was  her  Peter.  OnJy  he  didn't  know  it.  She  tried  to  gen- 
eralize. Had  it  ever  been  dignified  for  a  woman  to  wait  until 
a  man  discovered  her  possible  love?  Was  that  at  best  any- 
thing more  than  the  dignity  of  the  mannequin? 

Three-quarters  at  least  of  the  art  and  literature  of  the 
world  is  concerned  with  the  relations  of  the  sexes,  and  yet 
here  was  Joan,  after  thirty  centuries  or  so  of  human  art  and 
literature,  still  debating  the  elementary  facts  of  her  being. 
There  is  so  much  excitement  in  our  art  and  literature  and  so 
little  light.  The  world  has  still  to  discover  the  scope  and 
vastness  of  its  educational  responsibilites.  Most  of  its  teach- 
ing in  these  matters  hitherto  has  been  less  in  the  nature  of 
enlightenment  than  strategic  concealment ;  we  have  given  the 
young  neither  knowledge  nor  training,  we  have  restrained 
and  baffled  them  and  told  them  lies.  And  then  we  have 
inflamed  them.  We  have  abused  their  instinctive  trust 
when  they  were  children  with  stories  of  old  Bogey  designed 
to  save  us  the  bother  that  unrestrained  youthful  enterprise 
might  cause,  and  with  humorous  mockery  of  their  natural 
curiosity.  Jocularities  about  storks  and  gooseberry  bushes, 
sham  indignations  at  any  plainness  of  speech,  fierce  punish- 
ments of  imperfectly  reali/ed  offences,  this  against  a  back- 
ground of  giggles,  knowing  innuendo,  and  careless,  exciting 
glimpses  of  the  mystery,  have  constituted  the  ordinary  ini- 
tiation of  the  youth  of  the  world.  Right  up  to  full  age,  we 
still  fail  to  provide  the  clear  elemental  facts.  Our  young 
men  do  not  know  for  certain  whether  continence  is  healthy 
or  unhealthy,  possible  or  impossible;  the  sex  is  still  assured 
with  all  our  power  of  assurance,  that  the  only  pure  and 
proper  life  for  it  is  a  sexless  one.  Until  at  last  the  bright- 
est of  the  young  have  been  obliged  to  get  down  to  the  bare 
facts  in  themselves  and  begin  again  at  the  beginning.  .  .  . 

So  Joan,  co-Heiress  of  the  Ages  with  Peter,  found  that 
because  of  her  defaulting  trustees,  because  we  teachers, 
divines,  writers  and  the  like  have  shirked  what  was  disagree- 
able and  difficult  and  unpopular,  she  inherited  nothing  but 
debts  and  dangers.  She  had  not  even  that  touching  faith  in 
Nature  which  sustained  the  generation  of  Jean  Jacques  Rous- 
seau. She  had  to  set  about  her  problem  with  Peter  as 
though  he  and  she  were  Eve  and  Adam  in  a  garden  overrun 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      495 

with  weeds  and  thorns  into  which   God  had  never  come. 

Joan  was  too  young  yet  to  have  developed  the  compen- 
sating egotism  of  thwarted  femininity.  She  saw  Peter  with- 
out delusions.  He  was  a  bigger  and  cleverer  creature  than 
herself;  he  compelled  her  respect.  He  had  more  strength, 
more  invention,  more  initiative,  and  a  relatively  tremendous 
power  of  decision.  And  at  the  same  time  he  was  weak  and 
blind  and  stupid.  His  nickering,  unstable  sensuousness,  his 
light  adventurousness  and  a  certain  dishonesty  about  women, 
filled  her  with  a  comprehensive  pity  and  contempt.  There 
was  a  real  difference  not  merely  in  scale  but  in  nature  be- 
tween them.  It  was  cleat  to  her  now  that  the  passionate  and 
essential  realities  of  a  woman's  life  are  only  incidental  to  a 
man.  But  on  the  other  hand  there  were  passionate  and  es- 
sential realities  for  Peter  that  made  her  own  seem  narrow 
and  self-centred.  She  knew  far  more  of  his  mental  life  than 
Oswald  did.  She  knew  that  he  had  an  intense  passion  for 
clear  statement,  he  held  to  scientific  and  political  judgments 
with  a  power  altogether  deeper  and  greater  than  she  did ;  he 
cared  for  them  and  criticized  them  and  polished  them,  like 
weapons  that  had  been  entrusted  to  him.  Beneath  his  deb- 
onair mask  he  was  growing  into  a  strong  and  purposeful 
social  and  mental  personality.  She  perceived  that  he  was 
only  in  the  beginning  of  his  growth — if  he  came  on  no  misad- 
venture, if  he  did  not  waste  himself.  And  she  did  not  be- 
lieve that  she  herself  had  any  great  power  of  further  growth 
except  through  him.  But  linked  to  him  she  could  keep  pace 
with  him.  She  could  capture  his  senses,  keep  his  conscience, 
uphold  him.  .  .  . 

She  had  convinced  herself  now  that  that  was  her  chief 
business  in  life. 

Her  mind  was  remarkably  free  from  doubts  about  the 
future  if  once  she  could  get  at  her  Peter.  Mountains  and 
forests  of  use  and  wont  separated  them,  she  knew.  Peter 
had  acquired  a  habit  of  not  making  love  to  her  and  of  sep- 
arating her  from  the  thought  of  love.  But  if  ever  Peter 
came  over  these  mountains,  if  ever  he  came  through  the 

forest  to  her In  the  heart  of  the  forest,  she  would  keep 

him.  She  wasn't  afraid  that  Peter  would  leave  her  again. 
Wilmington  had  been  wrong  there.  That  he  had  suggested 


496  JOAN  AND  PETER 

in  the  bitterness  of  his  heart.  Men  like  Huntley  arid  Wiuter- 
baiim  were  always  astray,  but  Peter  was  uot  "looking  for 
women."  He  was  just  a  lost  man,  distracted  by  desire, 
desire  that  was  strong  because  he  was  energetic,  desire  that 
was  mischievous  and  unmeaning  because  he  had  lost  his  way 
in  these  things. 

"I  don't  care  so  very  much  how  long  it  takes,  Peter;  I 
don't  care  what  it  costs  me,"  said  Joan,  getting  her  role 
clear  at  last.  "I  don't  even  care — not  vitally  anyhow — 
how  you  wander  by  the  way.  No.  Because  you  're  my  man, 
Peter,  and  I  am  your  woman.  Because  so  it  was  written  in 
the  beginning.  But  you  are  coming  over  those  mountains, 
my  Peter,  though  they  go  up  to  the  sky ;  you  are  coining 
through  the  forests  though  1  have  to  make  a  path  for  you. 
You  are  coming  to  my  arms,  Peter  .  .  .  coining  to  me.  ..." 

So  Joan  framed  her  schemes,  regardless  of  the  swift  ap- 
proach of  the  day  of  battle  for  Peter.  She  was  resolved  to 
lose  nothing  by  neglect  or  delay,  but  also  she  meant  to  do 
nothing  precipitate.  To  begin  with  she  braced  herself  to 
the  disagreeable  task  of  really  thinking — instead  of  just  feel- 
ing— about  Hetty.  She  compared  herself  deliberately  point 
by  point  with  Hetty.  Long  ago  at  Pelham  Ford  she  had 
challenged  Hetty — and  Peter  had  come  out  of  the  old  library 
in  spite  of  Hetty  to  watch  her  dancing.  She  was  younger, 
she  was  fresher  and  cleaner,  she  was  a  ray  of  sunlight  to 
Hetty's  flames.  Hetty  was  good  company — perhaps.  But 
Peter  and  Joan  had  always  been  good  company  for  each 
other,  interested  in  a  score  of  common  subjects,  able  to  play 
the  same  games  and  run  abreast.  But  Hetty  was  "easy." 
There  was  her  strength.  Between  her  and  Peter  there  were 
no  barriers,  and  between  Joan  and  Peter  was  a  blank  wall, 
a  stern  taboo  upon  the  primary  among  youthful  interests,  a 
long  habit  of  aloofness,  dating  from  the  days  when  "soppy" 
was  the  ultimate  word  in  the  gamut  of  human  scorn. 

"It's  just  like  that,"  said  Joan. 

Those  barriers  had  to  be  broken  down,  without  a  shock. 
And  before  that  problem  Joan  maintained  a  frowning,  un- 
successful siege.  She  couldn't  begin  to  flirt  with  Peter. 
She  couldn't  make  eyes  at  him.  Such  things  would  be  in- 
tolerable. She  couldn't  devise  any  sort  of  signal.  And  so 


497 

how  the  devil  was  this  business  ever  to  begin?  And  while 
she  wrestled  vainly  with  this  perplexity  she  remained  more 
boyish,  more  good-fellow  and  companion  with  Peter  than 
ever.  .  .  . 

And  while  she  was  still  meditating  quite  fruitlessly  on 
this  riddle  of  changing  her  relationship  to  Peter,  he  was 
snatched  away  from  her  to  France. 

The  thing  happened  quite  unexpectedly.  He  came  up  to 
see  her  at  Hampstead  late  in  the  afternoon — it  was  by  a 
mere  chance  she  was  back  early.  He  was  full  of  pride  at 
being  chosen  to  go  so  soon.  He  seemed  brightly  excited  at 
going,  keen  for  the  great  adventure,  the  most  lovable  and 
animated  of  Peters — and  he  might  be  going  to  his  death. 
Hut  it  was  the  convention  of  the  time  never  to  think  of 
death,  and  anyhow  never  to  speak  of  it.  Some  engagement 
held  him  for  the  evening,  some  final  farewell  spree;  she  did 
not  ask  too  particularly  what  that  was.  She  could  guess 
only  too  well.  Altogether  they  were  about  five-and-twenty 
minutes  together,  with  Miss  Jepson  always  in  the  room  with 
them;  for  the  most  part  they  talked  air  shop;  and  then  he 
prepared  to  leave  with  all  her  scheming  still  at  loose  ends  in 
the  air.  "Well,"  he  said,  "good-bye,  old  Joan,"  and  held 
out  his  hand. 

"No,"  said  Joan,  with  a  sudden  resolution  in  her  eyes. 
"This  time  we  kiss,  Peter." 

"Well,"  said  Peter,  astonished. 

She  had  surprised  him.  He  stared  at  her  for  an  instant 
with  a  half-framed  question  in  his  eyes.  And  then  they 
kissed  very  gravely  and  carefully.  .But  she  kissed  him  on 
the  mouth. 

For  some  seconds  solemnity  hung  about  them.  Then  Peter 
turned  upon  Miss  Jepson.  "Do  you  want  a  kiss?"  said 
Peter.  .  .  . 

Miss  Jepson  was  all  for  kissing,  and  then  with  a  laugh 
and  an  effect  of  escape  Peter  had  gone  .  .  .  into  the  outer 
world  .  .  .  into  the  outer  air.  .  .  . 


498  JOAN  AND  PETER 


§  13 

He  flew  to  France  the  next  day,  above  the  grey  and  shin- 
ing stretches  of  water  and  two  little  anxious  ships,  and  he 
sent  Joan  a  cheerful  message  on  a  picture-postcard  of  a  shell- 
smashed  church  to  tell  of  his  safe  arrival. 

Joan  was  dismayed.  In  war  time  we  must  not  brood  on 
death,  one  does  not  think  of  death  if  one  can  help  it;  it  is 
the  chance  that  wrecks  all  calculations ;  but  the  fear  of  death 
had  fallen  suddenly  upon  all  her  plans.  And  what  was 
there  left  now  of  all  her  plans  ?  She  might  write  him  letters. 

Death  is  more  terrible  to  a  girl  in  love  than  to  any  other 
living  thing.  "If  he  dies,"  said  Joan,  "I  am  killed.  I 
shall  be  worse  than  a  widow — an  Indian  girl  widow.  Suttee ; 
what  will  be  left  of  me  but  ashes?  .  .  .  Some  poor  dregs  of 
Joan  carrying  on  a  bankrupt  life.  .  .  .  No  me.  .  ." 

There  was  nothing  for  it  but  to  write  him  letters.  And 
Joan  found  those  letters  incredibly  difficult  to  write.  All 
lightness  had  gone  from  her  touch.  After  long  and  tiring 
days  with  her  car  she  sat  writing  and  tearing  up  and  be- 
ginning again.  It  was  so  difficult  now  to  write  to  him,  to 
be  easy  in  manner  and  yet  insidious.  She  wanted  still  to 
seem  his  old  companion,  and  yet  to  hint  subtly  at  the  new 
state  of  things.  "There's  a  dull  feeling  now  you've  gone 
out  of  England,  Peter,"  she  wrote.  "I've  never  had  com- 
pany I  cared  for  in  all  the  world  as  I  care  for  yours."  And, 
"I  shall  count  the  days  to  your  leave,  Peter,  as  soon  as  I 
know  how  many  to  count.  I  didn't  guess  before  that  you 
were  a  sort  of  necessity  to  me."  Over  such  sentences,  sen- 
tences that  must  have  an  edge  and  yet  not  be  too  bold,  sen- 
tences full  of  tenderness  and  above  all  suspicion  of  "soppi- 
ness," Joan  pondered  like  a  poet  writing  a  sonnet.  .  .  . 

But  letters  went  slowly,  and  life  and  death  hustled  along 
together  very  swiftly  in  the  days  of  the  great  war.  .  .  . 


§  14 

Joan's  mind  was  full  of  love  and  life  and  the  fear  of  losing 
them,  but  Peter  was  thinking  but  little  of  love  and  life ;  he 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      499 

was  secretly  preoccupied  with  the  thought,  the  forbidden 
thought,  of  death,  and  with  the  strangeness  of  war  and  of 
this  earth  seen  from  an  aeroplane  ten  thousand  feet  or  so 
above  the  old  battlefields  of  mankind.  He  was  seeing  the 
world  in  plan,  and  realizing  what  a  flat  and  shallow  thing  it 
was.  On  clear  days  the  circuit  of  the  world  he  saw  had  a 
circumference  of  hundreds  of  miles,  night  flying  was  a  jour- 
ney amidst  the  stars  with  the  little  black  planet  far  away; 
there  was  no  former  achievement  of  the  race  that  did  not 
seem  to  him  now  like  a  miniature  toy  set  out  upon  the  floor 
of  an  untidy  nursery.  He  had  beaten  up  towards  the  very 
limits  of  life  and  air,  to  the  clear  thin  air  of  twenty-two  or 
twenty-three  thousand  feet;  he  had  been  in  the  blinding 
sunlight  when  everything  below  was  still  asleep  in  the  blue  of 
dawn. 

And  the  world  of  history  and  romance,  the  world  in  which 
he  and  all  his  ancestors  had  believed,  a  world  seen  in  eleva- 
tion, of  towering  frontages,  high  portals,  inaccessible  dignities, 
giddy  pinnacles  and  frowning  reputations,  had  now  fallen 
as  flat,  it  seemed,  as  the  fagade  of  the  Cloth  Hall  at  Ypres. 
(He  had  seen  that  one  day  from  above,  spread  out  upon 
the  ground.)  He  was  convinced  that  high  above  the  things 
of  the  past  he  droned  his  liquid  way  towards  a  new  sort  of 
life  altogether,  towards  a  greater  civilization,  a  world-wide 
life  for  men  with  no  boundaries  in  it  at  all  except  the  empti- 
ness of  outer  space,  a  life  of  freedom  and  exaltation  and 
tremendous  achievement.  But  meanwhile  the  old  things  of 
the  world  were  trying  most  desperately  to  kill  him.  Every 
day  the  enemy's  anti-aircraft  guns  seemed  to  grow  more  ac- 
curate; and  high  above  the  little  fleecy  clouds  lurked  the 
braggart  Markheimer  and  the  gallant  von  Papen  and  such- 
like German  champions,  with  their  decoys  below,  ready  to 
swoop  and  strike.  Never  before  had  the  world  promised 
Peter  so  tremendous  a  spectacle  as  it  seemed  to  promise 
now,  and  never  before  had  his  hope  of  living  to  see  it  been 
so  insecure. 

When  he  had  enlisted,  and  even  after  he  had  been  trans- 
ferred to  the  Flying  Corps,  Peter  had  thought  very  little  of 
death.  The  thought  of  death  only  became  prevalent  in  Eng- 
lish minds  towards  the  second  year  of  the  war.  It  is  a 


500  JOAN  AND  PETER 

hateful  and  unnatural  thought  in  youth,  easily  dismissed 
altogether  unless  circumstances  press  it  incessantly  upon  the 
attention.  But  even  before  Peter  went  to  France  two  of  his 
set  had  been  killed  under  his  eyes  in  a  collision  as  they  came 
down  into  the  aerodrome,  and  a  third  he  had  seen  two  miles 
away  get  into  a  spiral  nose  dive,  struggle  out  of  it  again,  and 
then  go  down  to  be  utterly  smashed  to  pieces.  In  one  day 
on  Salisbury  Plain  he  had  seen  three  accidents,  and  two,  he 
knew,  had  been  fatal  and  one  had  left  a  legless  thing  to 
crawl  through  life.  The  messes  in  France  seemed  populous 
with  young  ghosts ;  reminiscences  of  sprees,  talk  of  flying  ad- 
ventures were  laced  with,  "dear  old  boy!  he  went  west  last 
May."  "Went  west"  was  the  common  phrase.  They  never 
said  "killed."  They  hated  the  very  name  of  death.  They 
did  their  best,  these  dear  gallant  boys,  to  make  the  end 
seem  an  easy  and  familiar  part  of  life,  of  life  with  which 
they  were  so  joyously  in  love.  They  all  knew  that  the  dice 
was  loaded  against  them,  and  that  as  the  war  went  on  the 
chances  against  them  grew.  The  first  day  Peter  was  out  in 
France  he  saw  a  man  hit  and  brought  down  by  a  German 
Archie.  Two  days  after,  he  found  himself  the  centre  of  a 
sudden  constellation  of  whoofing  shells  that  left  inky  cloud- 
bursts over  him  and  under  him  and  round  about  him; 
he  saw  the  fabric  of  his  wing  jump  and  quiver,  and 
dropped  six  hundred  feet  or  so  to  shake  the  gunner 
off.  But  whuff  .  .  .  whuff  .  .  .  whuff,  like  the  bark  of 
a  monstrous  clog  .  .  .  the  beast  was  on  him  again  within  a 
minute,  and  Peter  did  two  or  three  loops  and  came  about  and 
got  away  with  almost  indecent  haste.  He  was  trembling; 
he  hated  it.  And  he  hated  to  tremble. 

In  the  mess  that  evening  the  talk  ran  on  the  "Pigeon 
shooter."  It  seemed  that  there  was  this  one  German  gun- 
ner far  quicker  and  more  deadly  than  any  of  his  fellows. 
He  had  a  knack  of  divining  what  an  airman  was  going  to  do. 
Peter  admitted  his  near  escape  and  sought  counsel. 

Peter's  colleagues  watched  him  narrowly  ami  unostenta- 
tiously when  they  advised  him.  Their  faces  were  masks  and 
his  face  was  a  mask,  and  they  were  keen  for  the  faintest  in- 
tonation of  what  was  behind  it.  They  all  hated  death,  they 
all  tried  not  to  think  of  death;  they  all  believed  that  there 


JOAN  AND  PETEE  GRADUATE      501 

were  Paladins,  other  fellows,  who  never  thought  of  death  at 
all.  When  the  tension  got  too  great  they  ragged;  they 
smashed  great  quantities  of  furniture  and  made  incredible 
volumes  of  noise.  Twice  Peter  got  away  from  the  aero- 
drome to  let  things  rip  in  Amiens.  But  such  outbreaks  were 
usually  followed  by  a  deep  depression  of  spirit.  In  the 
night  Peter  would  wake  up  and  find  the  thought  of  death  sit- 
ting by  his  bedside. 

So  far  Peter  had  never  had  a  fight.  He  had  gone  over 
the  enemy  lines  five  times,  he  had  bombed  a  troop  train  in  a 
station  and  a  regiment  resting  in  a  village,  he  believed  he 
had  killed  a  score  or  more  of  Germans  on  each  occasion  and 
he  felt  not  the  slightest  compunction,  but  he  had  not  yet 
come  across  a  fighting  Hun  plane.  He  had  very  grave 
doubts  about  the  issue  of  such  a  fight,  a  fight  that  was  bound 
to  come  sooner  or  later.  He  knew  he  was  not  such  a  quick 
pilot  as  he  would  like  to  be.  He  thought  quickly,  but  he 
thought  rather  too  much  for  rapid,  steady  decisions.  He 
had  the  balancing,  scientific  mind.  He  knew  that  none  of 
his  flights  were  perfect.  Always  there  was  a  conflict  of  in- 
tention at  some  point,  a  hesitation.  He  believed  he  might 
last  for  weeks  or  months,  but  he  knew  that  somewhen 
he  would  be  found  wanting — just  for  a  second  perhaps,  just 
in  the  turn  of  the  fight.  Then  he  would  be  killed.  He  hid 
quite  successfully  from  all  his  companions,  and  particularly 
from  his  squadron  commander,  this  conviction,  just  as  he  had 
previously  hidden  the  vague  funk  that  had  invariably  in- 
vaded his  being  whenever  he  walked  across  the  grounds  to- 
wards the  machine  during  his  days  of  instruction,  but  at  the 
back  of  his  mind  the  thought  that  his  time  was  limited  was 
always  present.  He  believed  that  he  had  to  die ;  it  might  be 
tomorrow  or  next  week  or  next  month,  but  somewhen  within 
the  year. 

When  these  convictions  became  uppermost  in  Peter's  mind 
a  black  discontent  possessed  him.  There  are  no  such  bitter 
critics  of  life  as  the  young;  theirs  is  a  magnificent  greed  for 
the  splendour  of  life.  They  have  no  patience  with  delays; 
their  blunders  and  failures  are  intolerable.  Peter  reviewed 
his  two-and-twenty  years — it  was  now  nearly  three-and- 
twenty — with  an  intense  dissatisfaction.  He  had  wasted  his 


502  JOAN  AND  PETER 

time,  and  now  he  had  got  into  a  narrow  way  that  led  down 
and  down  pitilessly  to  where  there  would  be  no  more  time  to 
waste.  He  had  been  aimless  and  the  world  had  been  aimless, 
and  then  it  had  suddenly  turned  upon  him  and  caught  him  in 
this  lobster-trap.  He  had  wasted  all  his  chances  of  great 
experience.  He  had  never  loved  a  woman  or  had  been  well 
loved  because  he  had  frittered  away  that  possibility  in  a 
hateful  sex  excitement  with  Hetty — who  did  not  even  pre- 
tend to  be  faithful  to  him.  And  now  things  had  got  into 
this  spin  to  death.  It  was  exactly  like  a  spin — like  a  spin- 
ning nose  dive — the  whole  affair,  his  life,  this  war.  .  .  . 

He  would  lie  and  fret  in  his  bed,  and  fret  all  the  more  be- 
cause he  knew  his  wakefulness  wasted  the  precious  nervous 
vigour  that  might  save  his  life  next  day. 

After  a  black  draught  of  such  thoughts  Peter  would  be- 
come excessively  noisy  and  facetious  in  the  mess  tent.  He 
was  recognized  and  applauded  as  a  wit  and  as  a  devil.  He 
was  really  very  good  at  Limericks,  delicately  indelicate,  upon 
the  names  of  his  fellow  officers  and  of  the  villages  along  the 
front — that  was  no  doubt  heredity,  the  gift  of  his  Aunt 
Phyllis — and  his  caricatures  adorned  the  mess.  It  was  also 
understood  that  he  was  a  rake.  .  .  . 

Peter's  evil  anticipations  were  only  too  well  justified.  He 
was  put  down  in  his  very  first  fight,  which  happened  over 
Dompierre.  He  had  bad  luck ;  he  was  struck  by  von  Papen, 
one  of  the  crack  German  fliers  on  that  part  of  the  front. 
He  was  up  at  ten  thousand  feet  or  so,  more  or  less  covering 
a  low-flying  photographer,  when  he  saw  a  German  machine 
coming  over  half  a  mile  perhaps  or  more  away  as  though  it 
was  looking  for  trouble.  Peter  knew  he  might  funk  a  fight, 
and  to  escape  that  moral  disaster,  headed  straight  down  for 
the  German,  who  dropped  and  made  off  southward.  Peter 
rejoicing  at  this  flight,  pursued,  his  eyes  upon  the  quarry. 
Then  from  out  of  the  sun  came  von  Papen,  swiftly  and  un- 
suspected, upon  Peter's  tail,  and  announced  his  presence  by 
a  whiff  of  bullets.  Peter  glanced  over  his  shoulder  to  dis- 
cover that  he  was  caught. 

"Oh  damn!"  cried  Peter,  and  ducked  his  head,  and  felt 
himself  stung  at  the  shoulder  and  wrist.  Splinters  were 
flying  about  him. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      503 

He  tried  a  side-slip,  and  as  he  did  so  he  had  an  instant's 
vision  of  yet  another  machine,  a  Frenchman  this  time,  fall- 
ing like  a  bolt  out  of  the  blue  upon  his  assailant.  The  biter 
was  bit. 

Peter  tried  to  come  round  and  help,  but  he  turned  right 
over  sideways  and  dropped,  and  suddenly  found  himself 
with  the  second  Hun  plane  coming  up  right  ahead  of  him. 
Peter  blazed  away,  but  God!  how  his  wrist  hurt  him!  He 
cursed  life  and  death.  He  blazed  away  with  his  machine 
going  over  more  and  more,  and  the  landscape  rushing  up 
over  his  head  and  then  getting  in  front  of  him  and  circling 
round.  For  some  seconds  he  did  not  know  what  was  up  and 
what  was  down.  He  continued  to  fire,  firing  earthward  for 
a  long  second  or  so  after  his  second  enemy  had  disappeared 
from  his  vision. 

The  world  was  spinning  round  faster  and  faster,  and 
everything  was  moving  away  outward,  faster  and  faster,  as 
if  it  was  all  hastening  to  get  out  of  his  way.  .  .  . 

This  surely  was  a  spinning  nose  dive,  the  spinning  nose 
dive — from  within.  Round  and  round.  Confusing  and 
giddy !  Just  as  he  had  seen  poor  old  Gordon  go  down.  .  .  . 
But  one  didn't  feel  at  all — as  Peter  had  supposed  one  must 
feel — like  an  egg  in  an  egg-whisk!  .  .  . 

Down  spun  the  aeroplane,  as  a  maple  fruit  in  autumn 
spins  to  the  ground.  Then  this  still  living  thing  that  had 
been  Peter,  all  bloody  and  broken,  made  a  last  supreme  ef- 
fort. And  his  luck  seconded  his  effort.  The  spin  grew 
slower  and  flatter.  Control  of  this  lurching,  eddying  aero- 
plane seemed  to  come  back,  escaped  again,  mocked  him.  The 
ground  was  very  near.  Now!  The  sky  swung  up  over  the 
whirling  propeller  again  and  stayed  above  it,  and  again  the 
machine  obeyed  a  reasonable  soul. 

He  was  out  of  it!  Out  of  a  nose  dive!  Yes.  Steady! 
It  is  so  easy  when  one's  head  is  whirling  to  get  back  into  a 
spin  again.  Steady !  .  .  . 

He  talked  to  himself.  "Oh!  good  Peter!  Good  Peter! 
Clever  Peter.  Wonderful  Mr.  Toad!  Stick  it!  Stick  it!" 
But  what  a  queer  right  hand  it  was!  Tt  was  covered  with 
blood.  And  it  crumpled  up  in  the  middle  when  he  clenched 
it !  Never  mind  ! 


504  JOAN  AND  PETER 

He  was  in  the  lowest  storey  of  the  air.  The  Hun  and  the 
Frenchman  up  there  were  in  another  world. 

Down  below,  quite  close — not  five  hundred  feet  now — 
were  field-greys  running  and  shooting  at  him.  They  were 
counting  their  chicken  before  he  was  hatched — no,  smashed. 
.  .  .  He  wasn't  done  yet!  Not  by  any  manner  of  means! 
A  wave  of  great  cheerfulness  and  confidence  buoyed  up 
Peter.  He  felt  equal  to  any  enterprise.  Should  he  drop 
and  let  the  bawling  Boche  have  a  round  or  so? 

And  there  was  a  Hun  machine  smashed  upside  down  on 
the  ground.  Was  that  the  second  fellow? 

Flick !  a  bullet ! 

Wiser  counsels  came  to  Peter.  This  was  no  place  for  a 
sick  and  giddy  man  with  a  smashed  and  bleeding  wrist.  He 
must  get  away. 

Up!  Which  way  was  west?  West?  The  sun  rises  in 
the  east  and  sets  in  the  west.  But  where  had  the  sun  got 
to?  It  was  hidden  by  his  wing.  Shadows!  The  shadows 
would  be  pointing  north-east,  that  was  the  tip.  .  .  .  Up ! 
There  were  the  Boche  trenches.  No,  Boche  reserve  trenches. 
.  .  .  Going  west,  going  west.  .  .  .  Rip!  Snap!  Bullet 
through  the  wing,  and  a  wire  flickering  about.  He  ducked 
his  head.  .  .  .  He  put  the  machine  up  steeply  to  perhaps 
a  thousand  feet.  .  .  . 

He  had  an  extraordinary  feeling  that  he  and  the  machine 
were  growing  and  swelling,  that  they  were  getting  bigger 
and  bigger,  and  the  sky  and  the  world  and  everything  else 
smaller.  At  last  he  was  a  monstrous  man  in  a  vast  aero- 
plane in  the  tiniest  of  universes.  He  was  as  great  as  God. 

That  wrist !  And  this  blood  !  Blood !  And  great,  glow- 
ing spots  of  blood  that  made  one's  sight  indistinct.  .  .  . 

He  coughed,  and  felt  his  mouth  full  of  blood,  and  spat  it 
out  and  retched.  .  .  . 

Then  in  an  instant  he  was  a  little  thing  again,  and  the  sky 
and  the  world  were  immense.  He  had  a  lucid  interval. 

One  ought  to  go  up  and  help  that  Frenchman.  Where 
were  they  fighting?  .  .  .  Up,  anyhow! 

This  must  be  No  Man's  Land.  That  crumpled  little  tiling 
was  a  dead  body  surely.  Barbed  wire.  More  barbed  wire. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE  505 

The  engine  was  missing.  Ugh!  That  fairly  put  the  lid 
on! 

Peter  was  already  asleep  and  dreaming.  The  great  blood 
spots  had  returned  and  increased,  but  now  they  were  getting 
black,  they  were  black,  huge  black  blotches ;  they  blotted  out 
the  world ! 

Peter,  Peter  as  we  have  known  him,  discontinued  exist- 
ence. .  .  . 

It  was  an  automaton,  aided  by  good  luck,  that  dropped  his 
machine  half  a  mile  behind  the  French  trenches.  .  .  . 


§  15 

Peter  had  no  memory  of  coming  to  again  from  his  faint. 
For  a  long  time  he  must  have  continued  to  be  purely  auto- 
matic. His  flaming  wrist  was  the  centre  of  his  being.  Then 
for  a  time  consciousness  resumed,  as  abruptly  as  the  thread 
of  a  story  one  finds  upon  the  torn  page  of  a  novel. 

He  found  himself  in  the  midst  of  a  friendly  group  of  pale 
blue  uniforms;  he  was  standing  up  and  being  very  lively  in 
spite  of  the  strong  taste  of  blood  in  his  mouth  and  a  feeling 
that  his  wrist  was  burning  as  a  match  burns,  and  that  the 
left  upper  half  of  his  body  had  been  changed  into  a  lump  of 
raw  and  bleeding  meat.  He  was  talking  a  sort  of  French. 
"C'est  sacre  bon  stuff,  cet  eau-de-vie  Fran^aise,"  he  was 
saying  gaily  and  rather  loudly. 

"Uaf  some  more,"  said  a  friendly  voice. 

"Not  half,  old  chap,"  said  Peter,  and  felt  at  the  time  that 
this  was  not  really  good  French. 

He  tried  to  slap  the  man  on  the  shoulder,  but  he  couldn't. 

' 'Bon!"  he  said,  "as  we  say  in  England,"  and  felt  that 
that  remark  also  failed. 

Some  one  protested  softly  against  his  being  given  more 
brandy.  .  .  . 

Then  this  clear  fragment  ended  again.  There  was  a  kind 
of  dream  of  rather  rough  but  efficient  surgery  upon  a  shoul- 
der and  arm  that  was  quite  probably  his  own,  and  some 
genially  amiable  conversation.  There  was  a  very  nice 


506  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Frenchman  with  a  black  beard  and  soft  eyes,  who  wore  a  long 
white  overall,  and  seemed  to  be  looking  after  him  as  ten- 
derly as  a  woman  could  do. 

But  with  these  things  mingled  the  matter  of  delirium. 
At  one  time  the  Kaiser  prevailed  in  Peter's  mind,  a  large, 
foolish,  pompous  person  with  waxed  moustaches  and  dis- 
traught eyes,  who  crawled  up  to  Peter  over  immense  piles  of 
white  and  grey  and  green  rotting  corpses,  and  began  gnaw- 
ing at  his  shoulder  almost  absent-mindedly.  Peter  struggled 
and  protested.  What  business  had  this  beastly  German  to 
come  interfering  with  Peter's  life?  He  started  a  vast  argu- 
ment about  that,  in  which  all  sorts  of  people,  including  the 
nice-looking  Frenchman  in  the  white  overall,  took  part. 

Peter  was  now  making  a  formal  complaint  about  the  con- 
duct of  the  universe.  "No,"  he  insisted  time  after  time,  "I 
will  not  deal  with  subordinates.  I  insist  on  seeing  the 
Head,"  and  so  at  last  he  found  himself  in  the  presence  of 
the  Lord  (Joel.  .  .  . 

But  Peter's  vision  of  the  Lord  God  was  the  most  delirious 
thing  of  all.  He  imagined  him  in  an  office,  a  little  office  in 
a  vast  buOding,  and  so  out  of  the  way  that  people  had  to 
ask  each  other  which  was  the  passage  and  which  the  stair- 
case. Old  men  stood  and  argued  at  corners  with  Peter's 
girl-guide  whether  it  was  this  way  or  that.  People  were  be- 
ing shown  over  the  building  by  girl-guides;  it  was  very  like 
the  London  War  Office,  only  more  so ;  there  were  great  num- 
bers of  visitors,  and  they  all  seemed  to  be  in  considerable 
hurry  and  distress,  and  most  of  them  were  looking  for  the 
Lord  God  to  lodge  a  complaint  and  demand  an  explanation, 
just  as  Peter  was.  For  a  time  all  the  visitors  became 
wounded  men,  and  nurses  mixed  up  with  the  girl-guides, 
and  Peter  was  being  carried  through  fresh  air  to  an  am- 
bulance train.  His  shoulder  and  wrist  were  very  painful 
and  singing,  as  it  were,  a  throbbing  duet  together. 

For  a  time  Peter  did  seem  to  see  the  Lord  God ;  he  was  in 
his  office,  a  little  brown,  rather  tired-looking  man  in  a  kepi, 
and  Peter  was  on  a  stretcher,  and  the  Lord  God  or  some  one 
near  him  was  saying:  "Quel  numero?"  But  that  passed 
away,  and  Peter  was  again  conducting  his  exploration  of  the 
corridors  with  a  girl-guide  who  was  sometimes  like  Joan  and 


507 

sometimes  like  Hetty — and  then  there  was  a  queer  disposi- 
tion to  loiter  in  the  passages.  .  .  .  For  a  time  he  sat  in  dis- 
habille while  Hetty  tried  to  explain  God.  .  .  .  Dreams  cross 
the  scent  o+'  dreams. 

Then  it  seemed  to  Peter's  fevered  brain  that  he  was  sit- 
ing, and  had  been  sitting  for  a  long  time,  in  the  little  office 
of  the  Lord  God  of  Heaven  and  Earth.  And  the  Lord  God 
had  the  likeness  of  a  lean,  tired,  intelligent-looking  oldish 
man,  with  an  air  of  futile  friendliness  masking  a  funda- 
mental inditl'erence. 

"My  dear  sir,"  the  Lord  God  was  saying,  "do  please  put 
that  cushion  behind  your  poor  shoulder.  I  can't  bear  to  see 
you  so  uncomfortable.  And  tell  me  everything.  Every- 
thing. .  .  ." 

The  office  was  the  dingiest  and  untidiest  little  office  it  was 
possible  to  imagine.  The  desk  at  which  God  sat  was  in  a 
terrible  litter.  On  a  side  table  were  some  grubby  test  tubes 
and  bottles  at  which  the  Lord  God  had  apparently  been  try- 
ing over  a  new  element.  The  windows  had  not  been  cleaned 
for  ages,  they  were  dark  with  spiders'  webs,  they  crawled 
with  a  buzzing  nightmare  of  horrible  and  unmeaning  life. 
It  was  a  most  unbusinesslike  office.  There  were  no  proper 
files,  no  card  indexes;  bundles  of  dusty  papers  were  thrust 
into  open  fixtures,  papers  littered  the  floors,  and  there  were 
brass-handled  drawers — .  Peter  looked  again,  and  blood 
was  oox.ing  from  these  drawers  and  little  cries  came  out  of 
them.  He  glanced  quickly  at  God,  and  God  was  looking  at 
him.  "But  did  you  really  make  this  world?"  he  asked. 

"I  thought  I  did,"  said  God. 

"But  why  did  you  do  it  V     Why?" 

"Ah,  there  you  have  me!"  said  the  Lord  God  with  bon- 
homie. 

"But  why  don't  you  exert  yourself?"  said  Peter,  hammer- 
ing at  the  desk  with  his  sound  hand.  "Why  don't  you  exert 
yourself?" 

Could  delirium  have  ever  invented  a  more  monstrous  con- 
ception than  this  of  Peter  hammering  on  an  untidy  desk 
amidst  old  pen  nibs,  bits  of  sealing-wax,  half-sheets  of  note- 
paper,  returns  of  nature's  waste,  sample  bones  of  projected 
animals,  mineral  samples,  dirty  little  test  tubes,  and  the  like, 


508  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  lecturing  the  Almighty  upon  the  dreadful  confusion  into 
which  the  world  had  fallen?  "Here  was  I,  sir,  and  mil- 
lions like  rue,  with  a  clear  promise  of  life  and  freedom! 
And  what  are  we  now?  Bruises,  red  bones,  dead  bodies! 
This  German  Kaiser  fellow — an  ass,  sir,  a  perfect  ass,  gnaw- 
ing a  great  hole  in  my  shoulder !  He  and  his  son,  stuffing 
themselves  with  a  Blut-Wurst  made  out  of  all  our  lives  and 
happiness!  What  does  it  mean,  sir?  Has  it  gone  entirely 
out  of  your  control  ?  And  it  isn't  as  if  the  whole  thing  was 
ridiculous,  sir.  It  isn't.  In  some  ways  it's  an  extraordi- 
narily tine  world — one  has  to  admit  that.  That  is  why  it  is 
all  so  distressing,  so  unendurably  distressing.  I  don't  in 
the  least  want  to  leave  it." 

"You  admit  that  it's  fine — in  places,"  said  the  Lord  God, 
as  if  he  valued  the  admission. 

"But  the  management,  sir!  the  management!  Yours — 

ultimately.  Don't  you  realize,  sir ?  I  had  the  greatest 

trouble  in  finding  you.  Half  the  messengers  don't  know 
where  this  den  of  yours  is.  It's  forgotten.  Practically  for- 
gotten. The  Head  Office!  And  now  I'm  here  I  can  tell 
you  everything  is  going  to  rack  and  ruin,  driving  straight  to 
an  absolute  and  final  smash  and  break-up." 

"As  bad  as  that?"  said  the  Lord  God. 

"It's  the  appalling  waste,"  Peter  continued.  "The  waste 
of  material,  the  waste  of  us,  the  waste  of  everything.  A  sort 
of  splendour  in  it,  there  is;  touches  of  real  genius  about  it, 
that  I  would  be  the  last  to  deny;  but  that  only  increases  the 
bitterness  of  the  disorder.  It's  a  good  enough  world  to 
lament.  It's  a  good  enough  life  to  resent  having  to  lose  it. 
There's  some  lovely  things  in  it,  sir;  courage,  endurance,  and 
oh!  many  beautiful  things.  But  when  one  gets  here,  when 
one  begins  to  ask  for  you  and  hunt  about  for  you,  and  finds 
this,  this  muddle,  sir,  then  one  begins  to  understand.  Look 
at  this  room,  consider  it — as  a  general  manager's  room.  No 
decency.  No  order.  Everywhere  the  dust  of  ages,  muck 
indescribable,  bacteria!  And  that!" 

That  was  a  cobweb  across  the  grimy  window  pane,  in 
which  a  freshly  entangled  bluebottle  fly  was  buzzing  fussily. 
"That  ought  not  to  be  here  at  all,"  said  Peter.  "It  really 
ought  not  to  exist  at  all.  Why  does  it  ?  Look  at  that  beastly 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE 

spider  in  the  corner!  Why  do  you.  suffer  all  these  cruel  and 
unclean  things?" 

"You  don't  like  it?"  said  the  Lord  God,  without  any  sign 
either  of  apology  or  explanation. 

"No,"  said  Peter  . 

"Then  chanye  it,"  said  the  Lord  God,  nodding  his  head 
as  who  should  say  "got  you  there." 

"Hut  how  are  we  to  change  it?" 

"If  you  have  no  will  to  change  it,  you  have  no  right  to 
criticize  it,"  said  the  Lord  (Joel,  leaning  back  with  the  weari- 
ness of  one  who  has  had  to  argue  with  each  generation  from 
Job  onward,  precisely  the  same  objections  and  precisely  the 
same  arguments 

"After  all,"  said  the  Lord  God,  giving  Peter  no  time  to 
speak  further;  "after  all,  you  are  three-and-twenty,  Mr. 
Peter  Stubland,  and  you've  been  pretty  busy  complaining 
of  me  and  everything  between  me  and  you,  your  masters, 
pastors,  teachers,  and  so  forth,  for  the  last  half-dozen  years. 
Meanwhile,  is  your  own  record  good?  Positive  achievements, 
forgive  me,  are  still  to  seek.  You've  been  nearly  drunk  sev- 
eral times,  you've  soiled  yourself  with  a  lot  of  very  cheap 
and  greedy  love-making — I  gave  you  something  beautiful 
there  anyhow,  and  you  knew  that  while  you  spoilt  it — you've 
been  a  vigorous  member  of  the  consuming  class,  and  really, 
you've  got  nothing  clear  and  planned,  nothing  at  all.  You 
complain  of  my  lack  of  order;  where 's  the  order  in  your  own 
rnincl?  If  I  was  the  hot  tempered  old  autocrat  some  of  you 
people  pretend  I  am,  1  should  have  been  tickling  you  up  with 
a  thunderbolt  long  ago.  But  I  happen  to  have  this  demo- 
cratic fad  as  badly  as  any  one — Free  Will  is  what  they  used 
to  call  it — and  so  1  leave  you  to  work  out  your  own  salva- 
tion. And  if  I  leave  you  alone  then  1  have  to  leave  that 
other — that  other  Mr.  Toad  at  Potsdam  alone.  He  tries  me, 
I  admit,  almost  to  the  miracle  pitch  at  times  with  the  tone 
of  his  everlasting  prepaid  telegrams — but  one  has  to  be  fair. 
What  is  sauce  for  the  goose  is  sauce  for  the  Kaiser.  I've  got 
to  leave  you  all  alone  if  I  leave  one  alone.  Don't  you  see 
that?  In  spite  of  the  mess  you  are  in.  So  don't  blame  me. 
Don't  blame  me.  There  isn't  a  thing  in  the  whole  of  this 
concern  of  mine  that  Man  can't  control  if  only  he  chooses  to 


510  JOAN  AND  PETER 

control  it.  It's  arranged  like  that.  There's  a  lot  more  sys- 
tem here  than  you  suspect,  only  it's  too  ingenious  for  you  to 
see.  It's  yours  to  command.  If  you  want  a  card  index 
for  the  world — well,  get  a  card  index.  I  won't  prevent  you. 
If  you  don't  like  my  spiders,  kill  my  spiders.  I'm  not  con- 
ceited about  them.  If  you  don't  like  the  Kaiser,  hang  him, 
assassinate  him.  Why  don't  you  abolish  Kings?  You  could. 
But  it  was  your  sort,  with  your  cheap  and  quick  efficiency 
schemes,  who  set  up  Saul — in  spite  of  my  protests — ages  ago. 
.  .  .  Humanity  either  makes  or  breeds  or  tolerates  all  its  own 
afflictions,  great  and  small.  Not  my  doing.  Take  Kings  and 
Courts.  Take  dungheaps  and  flies  It's  astonishing  you 
people  haven't  killed  off  all  the  flies  in  the  world  long  ago. 
They  do  no  end  of  mischief,  and  it  would  be  perfectly  easy  to 
do.  They're  purely  educational.  Purely.  Even  as  you  lie 
in  hospital,  there  they  are  buzzing  within  an  inch  of  your 
nose  and  landing  on  your  poor  forehead  to  remind  you  of 
what  a  properly  organized  humanity  could  do  for  its  own 
comfort.  But  there's  men  in  this  world  who  want  me  to  act 
as  a  fly-paper,  simply  because  they  are  too  lazy  to  get  one 
for  themselves.  My  dear  Mr.  Peter!  if  people  haven't  taught 
you  properly,  teach  yourself.  If  they  don't  know  enough, 
find  out.  It's  all  here.  All  here."  He  made  a  comprehen- 
sive gesture.  "I'm  not  mocking  you." 

"You're  not  mocking  meV"  said  Peter  keenly.  .  .  . 

"It  depends  upon  you,"  said  the  Lord  Cod  with  an  enig- 
matic smile.  "You  asked  me  why  I  didn't  exert  myself. 
"Well — why  don't  you  exert  yourself? 

"Why  don't  you  exert  yourself?"  the  Lord  God  repeated 
almost  rudely,  driving  it  home. 

"That  pillow  under  your  shoulder  still  isn't  comfortable," 
said  the  Lord  God,  breaking  off.  .  .  . 

The  buzzing  of  the  entangled  fly  changed  to  the  drone  of  a 
passing  aeroplane,  and  the  dingy  office  expanded  into  a  hos- 
pital ward.  Some  one  was  adjusting  Peter's  pillows.  .  .  . 

§  16 

If  his  shoulder-blade  was  to  mend,  Peter  could  not  be 
moved ;  and  for  a  time  he  remained  in  the  French  hospital 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      511 

in  a  long,  airy  room  that  was  full  mostly  with  flying  men 
like  himself.  At  tirst  he  could  not  talk  very  much,  but  later 
he  made  some  friends.  He  was  himself  very  immobile,  but 
other  men  came  and  sat  by  him  to  talk. 

He  talked  chiefly  to  two  Americans,  who  were  serving  at 
that  time  in  the  French  flying  corps.  He  found  it  much 
easier  to  talk  English  than  French  in  his  exhausted  state, 
for  though  both  he  and  Joan  spoke  French  far  above  the 
average  public  school  level,  he  found  that  now  it  came  with 
an  effort.  It  was  as  if  his  mind  had  for  a  time  been  pared 
down  to  its  essentials. 

These  Americans  amused  and  interested  him  tremendously. 
He  had  met  hardly  any  Americans  before  so  as  to  talk  to 
them  at  all  intimately,  but  they  suffered  from  an  inhibition 
of  French  perhaps  more  permanent  than  his  own,  and  so 
the  three  were  thrown  into  an  unlimited  intimacy  of  conver- 
sation. At  first  he  found  these  Americans  rather  fatiguing, 
and  then  he  found  them  very  refreshing  because  of  their  ex- 
plicitness  of  mind.  Except  when  they  broke  into  frothy 
rapids  of  slang  they  were  never  allusive ;  in  serious  talk  they 
said  everything.  They  laid  a  firm  foundation  for  all  their  as- 
sertions. That  is  the  last  thing  an  Englishman  does.  They 
talked  of  the  war  and  of  the  prospect  of  America  coming  into 
the  war,  and  of  England  and  America  and  again  of  the  war, 
and  of  the  French  and  of  the  French  and  Americans  and  of 
the  war,  and  of  Taft's  League  to  Enforce  Peace  and  the  true 
character  of  Wilson  and  Teddy  and  of  the  war,  and  of  Sam 
Hughes  and  Hughes  the  Australian,  and  whether  every  coun- 
try has  the  Hughes  it  deserves  and  of  the  war,  and  of  going 
to  England  after  the  war,  and  of  Stratford-on-Avon  and 
Chester  and  Windsor,  and  of  the  peculiarities  of  English 
people.  Their  ideas  of  England  Peter  discovered  were 
strange  and  picturesque.  They  believed  all  Englishmen 
lived  in  a  glow  of  personal  loyalty  to  the  Monarch,  and  were 
amazed  to  learn  that  Peter's  sentiments  were  republican; 
and  they  thought  that  every  Englishman  dearly  loved  a  lord. 
"We  think  that  of  Americans,"  said  Peter.  "That's  our 
politeness,"  said  they  in  a  chorus,  and  started  a  train  of 
profound  discoveries  in  international  relationships  in  Peter's 
mind. 


512  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"The  ideas  of  every  country  about  every  country  are  nec- 
essarily a  little  stale.  What  England  is,  what  England 
thinks,  and  what  England  is  becoming,  isn't  on  record. 
"What  is  on  record  is  the  England  of  the  'eighties  and 
'nineties." 

"Now,  that's  very  true,"  said  the  nearer  American. 
"And  you  can  apply  it  right  away,  with  a  hundred  per  cent, 
or  so  added,  to  all  your  ideas  of  America." 

As  a  consequence  both  sides  in  this  leisurely  discussion 
found  how  widely  they  had  been  out  in  their  ideas  about 
each  other.  Peter  discovered  America  as  not  nearly  so  com- 
mercial and  individualistic  as  he  had  supposed;  he  had  been 
altogether  ignorant  of  the  increasing  part  the  universities 
were  playing  in  her  affairs ;  the  Americans  were  equally  edi- 
fied to  find  that  the  rampant  imperialism  of  Cecil  Rhodes 
and  his  group  no  longer  ruled  the  British  imagination.  "If 
things  are  so,"  said  the  diplomatist  in  the  nearer  bed,  "then 
I  seem  to  see  a  lot  more  coming  together  between  us  than 
I've  ever  been  disposed  to  think  possible  before.  If  you 
British  aren't  so  keen  over  this  king  business " 

"Keen!"  said  Peter. 

"If  you  don't  hold  you  are  IT  and  unapproachable — in 
the  way  of  Empires." 

"The  Empire  is  yours  for  the  asking,"  said  Peter. 

"Then  all  there  is  between  us  is  the  Atlantic — and  that 
grows  narrower  every  year.  We're  the  same  people." 

"So  long  as  we  have  the  same  languages  and  literature," 
said  Peter.  .  .  . 

From  these  talks  onward  Peter  may  be  regarded  as  having 
a  Foreign  Policy  of  his  own. 


§  17 

And  it  was  in  this  hospital  that  Peter  first  clearly  decided 
to  become  personally  responsible  for  the  reconstruction  of 
the  British  Empire. 

This  decision  was  precipitated  by  the  sudden  reappear- 
ance in  his  world  of  Mir  Jelalludin,  the  Indian  whom  he  had 
once  thought  unsuitable  company  for  Joan. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      513 

Peter  had  been  dozing  when  Jelalludin  appeared.  He 
found  him  sitting  beside  the  bed,  and  stared  at  the  neat 
and  smiling  brown  face,  unable  to  place  him,  and  still  less 
able  to  account  for  the  uniform  he  was  wearing.  For  Jelal- 
ludin was  wearing  the  uniform  of  the  French  aviator,  and 
across  his  breast  he  wore  four  palms. 

"I  had  the  pleasure  of  knowing  you  at  Cambridge,"  said 
Mir  Jelalludin  in  his  Indian  staccato.  "Cha'ined  I  was  of 
use  to  you. ' ' 

An  explanatory  Frenchman  standing  beside  the  Indian 
dabbed  his  finger  on  the  last  of  Jelalludin 's  decorations. 
"He  killed  von  Papen  after  your  crash,"  said  the  French- 
man. 

''You  were  that  Frenchman ?"  said  Peter. 

"In  your  fight,"  said  Mir  Jelalludin. 

"He'd  have  finished  me,"  said  Peter. 

"I  finished  him,"  said  the  Indian,  laughing  with  sheer 
happiness,  and  showing  his  beautiful  teeth. 

Peter  contemplated  the  situation.  He  made  a  movement 
and  was  reminded  of  his  bandages. 

"I  wish  I  could  shake  hands,"  he  said. 

The  Indian  smiled  with  a  phantom  malice  in  his  smile. 

Peter  went  bluntly  to  a  question  that  had  arisen  in  his 
mind.  "Why  aren't  you  in  khaki?"  he  asked. 

''The  Brish'  Gu'ment  objects  to  Indian  flyers,"  said  Mir 
Jelalludin.  "I  tried.  But  Brish'  Gu'ment  thinks  flying 
beyond  us.  And  bad  for  Prestige.  Prestige  very  important 
thing  to  Brish'  Gu'ment.  So  I  came  to  France." 

Peter  continued  to  digest  the  situation. 

"Of  course,"  said  Jelalludin,  "no  commissions  given  in 
regular  army  to  Indians.  Brish'  soldiers  not  allowed  to 
s'lute  Indian  officers.  Not  part  of  the  Great  White  Race. 
Otherwise  hundreds  of  flyers  could  come  from  India,  hun- 
dreds and  hundreds.  We  play  cricket — good  horsemen. 
Many  Indian  gentlemen  must  be  first-rate  flying  stuff.  But 
Gu'ment  says  'No.'  ' 

He  continued  to  smile  more  cheerfully  than  ever. 

"Hundreds  of  juvenile  Indians  ready  and  willing  to  be 
killed  for  your  Empire" — he  rubbed  it  in — "but — No,  Thank 
You.  Indo-European  people  we  are,  Aryans,  more  consan- 


514  JOAN  AND  PETER 

guineous  than  Jews  or  Japanese.  Ready  to  take  our  places 
beside  you.  .  .  .  Well,  anyhow,  I  rejoice  to  see  that  you  are 
recovering  to  entire  satisfaction.  It  was  only  when  1  de- 
scended after  the  tight  that  I  perceived  that  it  was  you,  and 
it  seemed  to  me  then  that  you  were  very  seriously  injured. 
I  was  anxious.  And  mein'ries  of  otha  days.  I  felt  I  must 
see  you." 

Peter  and  the  young  Indian  looked  at  one  another. 

"Look  here,  Jelalludin, ' '  he  said,  "I  must  apologize." 

"But  why?" 

"As  part  of  the  British  Empire.  No!  don't  interrupt. 
I  do.  But,  I  say,  do  they — do  we  really  bar  you — abso- 
lutely?" 

"Absolutely.  Not  only  from  the  air  force,  but  from  any 
commission  at  all.  The  lowest  little  bazaar  clerk  from  Clap- 
ham,  who  has  got  a  commission,  is  over  our  Indian  officers — '• 
over  our  princes.  It  is  an  everlasting  humiliation.  Neces- 
sary for  Prestige." 

"The  French  have  more  sense,  anyhow." 

"They  take  us  on  our  merits. 

"If  I  had  a  British  commission,"  said  Jelalludin,  "I  should 
be  made  very  uncomfortable.  It  is  the  way  with  British 
officers  and  gentlemen.  The  French  are  not  so — particular." 

"At  present,"  said  Peter,  "I  can't  be  moved." 

"You  improve." 

"But  when  I  get  up  this  is  one  of  the  things  I  have  to 
see  to.  You  see,  Jelalludin,  this  Empire  of  ours — yours  and 
mine — has  got  into  the  hands  of  a  gang  of  gory  Old  Fools. 
Partly  my  negligence — as  God  said." 

"God?  "said  Jelalludin. 

"Oh,  nothing!  I  mean  we  young  men  haven't  been  given 
a  proper  grasp  of  the  Indian  situation.  Or  any  situation. 

No.  This  business  of  the  commissions !  after  all  that 

you  fellows  have  done  here  in  France!  It's  disgraceful. 
You  see,  we  don't  see  or  learn  anything  about  India.  Even 
at  Cambridge " 

"You  didn't  see  much  of  us  there,"  smiled  the  Indian. 

"I'm  sorry,"  said  Peter. 

"I  didn't  come  to  talk  about  this,"  said  Jelalludin,  "it 
came  out." 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      515 

''I'm  glad  it  came  out,"  said  Peter. 

A  pause. 

"I  mustn't  tire  you,"  said  Mir  Jelalludin,  and  rose  to  go. 

Peter  thanked  him  for  coming. 

"And  your  cha'ining  sister?"  asked  the  Indian,  as  if  by 
an  afterthought. 

"Foster  sister.  She  drives  a  big  car  about  London," 
said  Peter.  .  .  . 

Peter  meditated  profoundly  upon  that  interview  for  some 
days. 

Then  he  tried  over  the  opinions  of  the  Americans  about 
India.  But  Americans  are  of  little  help  to  the  British  about 
India.  Their  simple  uncriticized  colour  prejudice  covers  all 
"Asiatics"  except  the  inhabitants  of  Siberia.  They  had  a 
more  than  English  ignorance  of  ethnology,  and  Oswald  had 
at  least  imparted  some  fragments  of  that  important  science 
to  his  ward.  Their  working  classification  of  mankind  was 
into  Anglo-Saxons,  Frenchmen,  Sheenies,  Irishmen,  Dutch- 
men, Dagoes,  Chinks,  Coloured  People,  and  black  Niggers. 
They  esteemed  Mir  Jelalludin  a  Coloured  Person.  Peter  had 
to  fall  back  upon  himself  again. 


§  18 

It  contributed  to  the  thoroughness  of  Peter's  thinking 
that  it  was  some  time  before  he  could  be  put  into  a  position 
to  read  comfortably.  And  it  has  to  be  recorded  in  the  teeth 
of  the  dictates  of  sentiments  and  the  most  sacred  traditions 
of  romance  that  the  role  played  by  both  Joan  and  Hetty  in 
these  meditations  was  secondary  and  incidental.  It  was  an 
attenuated  and  abstract  Peter  who  lay  in  the  French  hos- 
pital, his  chief  link  of  sense  with  life  was  a  growing  hunger; 
he  thought  very  much  about  fate,  pain,  the  nature  of  things, 
and  God,  and  very  little  about  persons  and  personal  inci- 
dents— and  so  strong  an  effect  had  his  dream  that  God  re- 
mained fixed  steadfastly  in  his  mind  as  that  same  intellectual 
non-interventionist  whom  he  had  visited  in  the  fly-blown 
office.  But  about  God's  rankling  repartee,  "Why  don't  you 
exert  yourself?"  there  was  accumulating  a  new  conception, 


516  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  conception  of  Man  taking  hold  of  the  world,  unassisted 
by  God  but  with  the  acquiescence  of  God,  and  in  fulfilment 
of  some  remote,  incomprehensible  planning  on  the  part  of 
God.  Probably  Peter  in  thinking  this  was  following  one 
of  the  most  ancient  arid  well-beaten  of  speculative  paths, 
but  it  seemed  to  him  that  it  was  a  new  way  of  thinking. 
And  he  was  Man.  It  was  he  who  had  to  establish  justice  in 
the  earth,  achieve  unity,  and  rule  first  the  world  and  then 
the  stars. 

He  lay  staring  at  the  ceiling,  and  quite  happy  now  that 
healing  and  habituatiou  had  freed  him  from  positive  pain, 
thinking  out  how  he  was  to  release  and  co-operate  with  his 
India,  which  had  invariably  the  face  of  Mir  Jelalludin,  how 
he  was  to  reunite  himself  with  his  brothers  in  America,  and 
how  the  walls  and  divisions  of  mankind,  which  look  so  high 
and  invincible  upon  the  ground  and  so  trivial  from  twelve 
thousand  feet  above,  were  to  be  subdued  to  such  greater  ends. 

It  was  only  as  the  blood  corpuscles  multiplied  inside  him 
that  Peter  ceased  to  be  constantly  Man  contemplating  his 
Destiny  and  Races  and  Empires,  and  for  more  and  more 
hours  in  the  day  shrank  to  the  dimensions  and  natural 
warmth  of  Mr.  Peter  Stubland  contemplating  convalescence 
in  Blighty.  He  became  eager  first  for  the  dear  old  indulgent 
and  welcoming  house  at  Pelham  Ford,  and  then  for  prowls 
and  walks  and  gossip  with  Joan  and  Oswald,  and  then,  then 
for  London  and  a  little  "fun."  Life  was  ebbing  back  into 
what  is  understood  to  be  the  lower  nature,  and  was  certainly 
the  most  intimate  and  distinctive  substance  of  Mr.  Peter 
Stubland.  His  correspondence  became  of  very  great  inter- 
est to  him.  Certain  letters  from  Joan,  faint  but  pursuin«r, 
had  reached  him,  those  letters  over  which  Joan  had  sat  like 
a  sonneteer.  He  read  them  and  warmed  to  them.  He 
thought  what  luck  it  was  that  he  had  a  Joan  to  be  the  best 
of  sisters  to  him,  to  be  even  more  than  a  sister.  She  was  the 
best  friend  he  had,  and  it  was  jolly  to  read  so  plainly  that 
he  was  her  best  friend.  He  would  like  to  do  work  with  Joan 
better  than  with  any  man  he  knew.  Driving  a  car  wasn't 
half  good  enough  for  her.  Some  day  he'd  be  able  to  show 
her  how  to  fly,  and  he  would.  It  would  be  great  fun  going 
up  with  Joan  on  a  double  control  and  letting  her  take  over. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      517 

There  must  be  girls  in  the  world  who  would  fly  as  well  as 
any  man,  or  better. 

He  scribbled  these  ideas  in  his  first  letter  to  Joan,  and 
they  pleased  her  mightily.  To  fly  with  Peter  would  be 
surely  to  fly  straight  into  heaven. 

And  mixed  up  with  Joan's  letters  were  others  that  he 
presently  sorted  out  from  hers  and  put  apart,  as  though 
even  letters  might  hold  inconvenient  communion.  For  the 
most  part  they  came  from  Hetty  Reinhart,  and  displayed  the 
emotions  of  a  consciously  delicious  female  enamoured  and 
enslaved  by  one  of  the  heroes  of  the  air.  She  had  dreamt  of 
him  coming  in  through  the  skylight  of  her  studio,  Lord 
Cupid  visiting  his  poor  little  Psyche — "but  it  was  only  the 
moonlight,"  and  she  thought  of  him  now  always  with  great 
overshadowing  wings.  Sometimes  they  were  great  white 
wings  that  beat  above  her,  and  sometimes  they  were  thrill- 
ingly  soft  and  exquisite  wings,  like  the  wings  of  the  people 
in  Peter  Wilkins.  She  sent  him  a  copy  of  Peter  Wilkins, 
book  beloved  by  Poe  and  all  readers  of  the  fantastic.  Then 
came  the  news  of  his  smash.  She  had  been  clever  enough  to 
link  it  with  the  death  of  von  Papen,  the  Hun  Matador. 
"Was  that  your  light,  dear  Peterkins?  Did  you  begin  on 
Goliath?"  As  the  cordials  of  recovery  raced  through 
Peter's  veins  there  were  phases  when  the  thought  of  visiting 
the  yielding  fair,  Jovelike  and  triumphant  in  winged  glory, 
became  not  simply  attractive  but  insistent.  But  he  wrote 
to  Hetty  modestly,  "They've  clipped  one  wing  for  ever." 

And  so  in  a  quite  artless  and  inevitable  wray  Peter  found 
his  first  leave,  when  the  British  hospital  had  done  with  him, 
mortgaged  up  to  hilt  almost  equally  to  dear  friend  Joan  and 
to  Cleopatra  Hetty. 

The  young  man  only  realized  the  duplicity  of  his  nature 
and  the  complications  of  his  position  as  the  hospital  boat 
beat  its  homeward  way  across  the  Channel.  The  night  was 
smooth  and  fine,  with  a  high  full  moon  which  somehow  sug- 
gested Hetty,  and  with  a  cloud  scheme  of  great  beauty  and 
distinction  that  had  about  it  a  flavour  of  Joan.  And  as  he 
meditated  upon  these  complications  that  had  been  happen- 
ing in  his  more  personal  life  while  his  attention  had  been 
still  largely  occupied  with  divinity  and  polities,  he  was 


518  JOAN  AND  PETER 

hailed  by  an  unfamiliar  voice  and  addressed  as  "Simon 
Peter."  "Excuse  me,"  said  the  stout  young  officer  tucked 
up  warmly  upon  the  next  deck  chair  between  a  pair  of 
crutches,  "but  aren't  you  Simon  Peter?" 

Peter  had  heard  that  name  somewhere  before.  "My 
name's  Stubland,"  he  said. 

"Ah!  Stubland!  I  forgot  your  surname.  Of  High 
Cross  School?" 

Peter  peered  and  saw  a  round  fair  face  that  slowly  re- 
called memories.  "Wait  a  moment!"  said  Peter.  .  .  . 
"Ames!" 

"Guessed  it  in  one.     Probyn  and  I  were  chums." 

"What  have  you  got?"  said  Peter. 

"Leg  below  the  knee  off,  damn  it!"  said  Ames.  "One 
month  at  the  front.  Not  much  of  a  career.  But  they  say 
they  do  you  a  leg  now  better  than  reality.  But  I  'd  have  liked 
to  have  batted  the  pants  of  the  unspeakable  Hun  a  bit  more 
before  I  retired.  What  have  you  got?" 

"Wrist  chiefly  and  shoulder-blade.  Air  fight.  After  six 
weeks. ' ' 

"Does  you  out?" 

"For  flying,  I'm  afraid.  But  there's  lots  of  ground  jobs. 
And  anyhow — home's  pleasant." 

"Yes,"  said  Ames.  "Home's  pleasant.  But  I'd  like  to 
have  got  a  scalp  of  some  sort.  Doubt  if  I  killed  a  single 
Hun.  D'you  remember  Probyn  at  school? — a  dark  chap." 

Peter  found  he  still  hated  Probyn.  "I  remember  him," 
he  said. 

"He's  killed.  He  got  the  M.M.  and  the  V.C.  He 
wouldn't  take  a  commission.  He  was  sergeant-major  in  my 
battalion.  I  just  saw  him,  but  I've  heard  about  him  since. 
His  men  worshipped  him.  Queer  how  men  come  out  in  a 
new  light  in  this  war." 

"How  was  he  killed?"  asked  Peter. 

"In  a  raid.  He  was  with  a  bombing  party,  and  three  men 
straggled  up  a  sap  and  got  cornered.  He'd  taken  two  ma- 
chine-guns and  they  'd  used  most  of  the  bombs,  and  his  officer 
was  knocked  out,  so  he  sent  the  rest  of  his  party  back  with 
the  stuff  and  went  to  fetch  his  other  men.  One  had  been  hit 
.and  the  other  two  were  thinking  of  surrendering  when  he 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      519 

came  back  to  them.  He  stood  right  up  on  the  parados,  they 
say,  arid  slung  bombs  at  the  Germans,  a  whole  crowd  of  them, 
until  they  went  back.  His  two  chaps  got  the  wounded  man 
out  and  carried  him  back,  and  left  him  still  slinging  bombs. 
He'd  do  that.  He'd  stand  right  up  and  bung  bombs  at 
them  until  they  seemed  to  lose  their  heads.  Then  he  seems 
to  have  spotted  that  this  particular  bunch  of  Germans  had 
gone  back  into  a  sort  of  blind  alley.  He  was  very  quick  at 
spotting  a  situation,  and  he  followed  them  up,  and  the  sheer 
blank  recklessness  of  it  seems  to  have  put  their  wind  up  ab- 
solutely. They'd  got  bombs  and  there  was  an  officer  with 
them.  But  they  held  up  their  hands — nine  of  them.  Panic. 
He  got  them  right  across  to  our  trenches  before  the  search- 
lights found  him,  and  the  Germans  got  him  and  tw.o  of  their 
own  chaps  with  a  machine-gun.  That  was  just  the  last  thing 
he  did.  He'd  been  going  about  for  months  doing  stunts 
like  that — sort  of  charmed  life  business.  The  way  he  slung 
bombs,  they  say,  amounted  to  genius. 

"They  say  he'd  let  his  hair  grow  long — perfect  golliwog. 
When  1  saw  him  it  certainly  was  long,  but  he'd  got  it  plas- 
tered down.  And  there's  a  story  that  he  used  to  put  white 
on  his  face  like  a  clown  with  a  great  red  mouth  reaching 
from  ear  to  ear — —  Yes,  painted  on.  It's  put  the  Huns' 
wind  up  something  frightful.  Coming  suddenly  on  a  chap 
like  that  in  the  glare  of  a  searchlight  or  a  flare." 

"Queer  end,"  said  Peter. 

"Queer  chap  altogether,"  said  Ames.  .  .  . 

He  thought  for  a  time,  and  then  went  on  to  philosophize 
about  Probyn. 

"Clever  chap  he  was,"  said  Ames,  "but  an  absolute  fail- 
ure. Of  course  old  High  Cross  wasn't  anything  very  much 
in  the  way  of  a  school,  but  whatever  there  was  to  be  learnt 
there  he  learnt.  He  was  the  only  one  of  us  who  ever  got 
hold  of  speaking  French.  1  heard  him  over  there — regular 
fluent.  And  he?d  got  a  memory  like  an  encyclopaedia.  I 
always  said  he'd  do  wonders.  ..." 

Ames  paused.     "Sex  was  his  downfall,"  said  Ames. 

"I  saw  a  lot  of  him  altogether,  off  and  on,  right  up  to 
the  time  of  the  war,"  said  Ames.  "My  people  are  furni- 
ture people,  you  know,  in  Tottenham  Court  Road,  and  his 


520  JOAN  AND  PETER 

were  in  the  public-house  fitting  line — in  Highbury.  We 
went  about  together.  I  saw  him  make  three  or  four  good 
starts,  but  there  was  always  some  trouble.  I  suppose  most 
of  us  were  a  bit — well,  keen  on  sex ;  most  of  us  young  men. 
But  he  was  ravenous.  Even  at  school.  Always  on  it.  Al- 
ways thinking  about  it.  I  could  tell  you  stories  of  him.  .  .  . 
Rum  place  that  old  school  was,  come  to  think  of  it.  They 

left  us  about  too  much.  I  don't  know  how  far  you .  .  .  . 

Of  course  you  were  about  the  most  innocent  thing  that  ever 
came  to  High  Cross  School,"  said  Ames. 

' '  Yes, ' '  said  Peter.     ' '  I  suppose  I  was. ' ' 

"Curious  how  it  gnaws  at  you  once  it's  set  going,"  said 
Ames.  .  .  . 

Peter  made  a  noise  that  might  have  been  assent. 

Ames  remained  thinking  for  a  time,  watching  the  swish 
and  surge  of  the  black  Channel  waters.  Peter  pursued  their 
common  topic  in  silence. 

"What's  the  sense  of  it?"  said  Ames,  plunging  towards 
philosophy. 

"It's  the  system  on  which  life  goes — on  this  planet," 
Peter  contributed,  but  Ames  had  not  had  a  biological  train- 
ing, and  was  unprepared  to  take  that  up. 

"Too  much  of  it,"  said  Ames. 

"Over-sexed,"  said  Peter. 

"Whether  one  ought  to  hold  oneself  in  or  let  oneself  go," 
said  Ames.  "But  perhaps  these  things  don't  bother  you?" 

Peter  wasn't  disposed  towards  confidences  with  Ames. 
"I'm  moderate  in  all  things,"  he  said. 

"Lucky  chap!  I've  worried  about  this  business  no  end. 
One  doesn't  want  to  use  up  all  one's  life  like  a  blessed 
monkey.  There's  other  things  in  life — if  only  this  everlast- 
ing want-a-girl  want-a-woman  would  let  one  get  at  them." 

His  voice  at  Peter's  shoulder  ceased  for  a  while,  and  then 
resumed.  "It's  the  best  chaps,  seems  to  me,  who  get  it  worst. 
Chaps  with  imaginations,  I  mean,  men  of  vitality.  Take  old 
Probyn.  He  could  have  done  anything — anything.  And  he 
was  eaten  up.  Like  a  fever.  ..." 

Ames  went  down  into  a  black  silence  for  a  couple  of  min- 
utes or  more,  and  came  up  again  with  an  astonishing  resolu- 
tion. ' '  I  shall  marry, ' '  he  said. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      521 

"Got  the  lady?"  asked  Peter. 

"Near  enough,"  said  Ames  darkly. 

4 'St.  Paul's  method,"  said  Peter. 

"I  was  talking  to  a  fellow  the  other  day,"  said  Ames. 
"He'd  got  a  curious  idea.  Something  in  it  perhaps.  He 
said  that  every  one  was  clean-minded  and  romantic,  that's 
how  he  put  it,  about  sixteen  or  seventeen.  Even  if  you've 
been  a  bit  dirty  as  a  schoolboy  you  sort  of  clean  up  then. 
Adolescence,  in  fact.  And  he  said  you  ought  to  fall  in  love 
and  pair  off  then.  Kind  of  Romeo  and  Juliet  business. 
First  love  and  all  that. ' ' 

"Juliet  wasn't  exactly  Romeo's  first  love,"  said  Peter. 

"Young  beggar!"  said  Ames.  "But,  anyhow,  that  was 
only  by  way  of  illustration.  His  idea  was  that  we'd  sort  of 
put  off  marriage  and  all  that  sort  of  thing  later  and  later. 
Twenty-eight.  Thirty.  Thirty-five  even.  And  that  put  us 
wrong.  We  kind  of  curdled  and  fermented.  Spoilt  with 
keeping.  Larked  about  with  girls  we  didn't  care  for. 
Demi-vierge  stunts  and  all  that.  Got  promiscuous.  Let 
anything  do.  His  idea  was  you'd  got  to  pair  off  with  a  girl 
and  look  after  her,  and  she  look  after  you.  And  keep  faith. 
And  stop  all  stray  mucking  about.  'Settle  down  to  a  healthy 
sexual  peace,'  he  said." 

Ames  paused.     "Something  in  it?" 

"Ever  read  the  Life  of  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury?" 
asked  Peter. 

"Never." 

"He  worked  out  that  theory  quite  successfully.  Married 
before  he  went  up  to  Oxford.  There's  a  lot  in  it.  Sex. 
Delayed.  Fretting.  Overflowing.  Getting  experimental 
and  nasty.  .  .  .  But  that  doesn't  exhaust  the  question. 
The  Old  Experimenter  sits  there " 

"What  experimenter?" 

"The  chap  who  started  it  all.  There's  no  way  yet  of  fit- 
ting it  up  perfectly.  We've  got  to  make  it  fit." 

Peter  was  so  interested  that  he  forgot  his  aversion  from 
confiding  in  Ames.  The  subject  carried  him  on. 

"Any  healthy  young  man,"  Peter  generalized,  "could  be 
happy  and  contented  with  any  pretty  girl,  so  far  as  love- 
making  goes.  It  doesn't  strike  you — as  a  particularly  recon- 


522  JOAN  AND  PETER 

dite  art,  eh?  But  you've  got  to  be  in  love  with  each  other 
generally.  That's  more  difficult.  You've  got  to  talk  to- 
gether and  go  about  together.  In  a  complicated  artificial 
world.  The  sort  of  woman  it's  easy  and  pleasant  to  make 
love  to,  may  not  be  the  sort  of  woman  you  really  think 
splendid.  It's  easier  to  make  love  to  a  woman  you 
don't  particularly  respect,  who's  good  fun,  and  all  that. 
Which  is  just  the  reason  why  you  wouldn't  be  tied  up  with 
her  for  ever.  No." 

"So  we  worship  the  angels  and  marry  the  flappers,"  said 
Ames.  ...  "I  shan't  do  that,  anyhow.  The  fact  is,  one 
needs  a  kind  of  motherliness  in  a  woman." 

"By  making  love  too  serious,  we've  made  it  not  serious 
enough,"  said  Peter  with  oracular  profundity,  and  then  in 
reaction,  "Oh!  /  don't  know." 

"/  don't  know,"  said  Ames. 

"Which  doesn't  in  the  least  absolve  us  from  the  necessity 
of  going  on  living  right  away." 

"I  shall  marry,"  said  Ames,  in  a  tone  of  unalterable  re- 
solve. 

They  lapsed  into  self-centred  meditations.  .  .  . 

"Why!  there's  the  coast,"  said  Ames  suddenly.  "Quite 
close,  too.  Dark.  Do  you  remember,  before  the  war,  how 
the  lights  of  Folkestone  used  to  run  along  the  top  there  like 
a  necklace  of  fire?" 


§  19 

The  powers  that  were  set  over  Peter's  life  played  fast  and 
loose  with  him  in  the  matter  of  leave.  They  treated  him 
at  first  as  though  he  was  a  rare  and  precious  hero — who  had 
to  be  saved  from  his  friends.  They  put  him  to  mend  at 
Broadstairs,  and  while  he  was  at  Broadstairs  he  had  three 
visits  from  Hetty,  whose  days  were  free,  and  only  one  hasty 
Sunday  glimpse  of  Joan,  who  was  much  in  demand  at  the 
Ministry  of  Munitions.  And  Oswald  could  not  come  to  see 
him  because  Oswald  himself  was  a  casualty  mending  slowly 
at  Pelharn  Ford.  Hetty  and  Joan  and  returning  health 
fired  the  mind  of  Peter  with  great  expectations  of  the  leave 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      523 

that  was  to  come.  These  expectations  were,  so  to  speak, 
painted  in  panels.  Forgetful  of  the  plain  fact  that  a  Joan 
who  was  not  available  at  Broadstairs  would  also  not  be  avail- 
able at  Pelhain  Ford,  the  panels  devoted  to  the  latter  place 
invariably  included  Joan  as  a  principal  figure,  they  repre- 
sented leave  as  a  glorious  escape  from  war  to  the  space,  the 
sunshine,  the  endlessness  of  such  a  summer  vacation  as  only 
schoolboys  know.  He  would  be  climbing  trees  with  Joan, 
"mucking  about"  in  the  boats  with  Joan,  lying  on  the  lawn 
just  on  the  edge  of  the  cedar's  shadow  with  Joan,  nibbling 
stems  of  grass.  The  London  scenes  were  narrower  and  more 
intense.  He  wanted  the  glitter  and  fun  of  lunching  in  the 
Carltou  grill-room  or  dining  at  the  Criterion,  in  the  com- 
pany of  a  tremendous  hat  and  transparent  lace,  and  there 
were  scenes  in  Hetty's  studio,  quite  a  Jot  of  fantastic  and 
elemental  scenes  in  Hetty's  studio. 

But  the  Germans  have  wiped  those  days  of  limitless 
leisure  out  of  the  life  of  mankind.  Even  our  schoolboys 
stay  up  in  their  holidays  now  to  make  munitions.  Peter 
had  scarcely  clambered  past  the  approval  of  a  medical  board 
before  active  service  snatched  him  again.  He  was  wanted 
urgently.  Peter  was  no  good  as  a  pilot  any  more,  it  was 
true ;  his  right  wrist  was  doomed  to  be  stiff  and  weak  hence- 
forth, and  there  were  queer  little  limitations  upon  the  swing 
of  his  arm,  but  the  powers  had  suddenly  discovered  other 
uses  for  him.  There  was  more  of  Peter  still  left  than  they 
had  assumed  at  first.  For  one  particular  job,  indeed,  he  was 
just  the  man  they  needed.  They  docked  him  a  wing — it 
seemed  in  mockery  of  the  state  of  his  arm — and  replaced  the 
two  wings  that  had  adorned  him  by  one  attached  to  the  letter 
O,  and  they  marked  him  down  to  join  "balloons"  at  the  earli- 
est possible  moment,  for  just  then  they  were  developing  kite 
balloons  very  fast  for  artillery  observation,  and  were  eager 
for  any  available  men.  Peter  was  slung  out  into  freedom 
for  one-and-twenty  days,  and  then  told  to  report  himself  for 
special  instruction  in  the  new  work  at  Richmond  Park. 

One-and-twenty  days !  He  had  never  been  so  inordinately 
greedy  for  life,  free  to  live  and  go  as  you  please,  in  all  his 
days  before.  Something  must  happen,  he  was  resolved,  some- 
thing bright  and  intense,  on  every  one  of  those  days.  He 


524  JOAN  AND  PETEE 

snatched  at  both  sides  of  life.  He  went  down  to  Pelham 
Ford,  but  he  had  a  little  list  of  engagements  in  town  in  his 
pocket.  Joan  was  not  down  there,  and  never  before  had  he 
realized  how  tremendously  absent  Joan  could  be.  And  then 
at  the  week-end  she  couldn't  come.  There  were  French  and 
British  G.H.Q.  bigwigs  to  take  down  to  some  experiments  in 
Sussex,  but  she  couldn't  even  explain  that,  she  had  to  send  a 
telegram  at  the  eleventh  hour:  "Week-end  impossible." 
To  Peter  that  seemed  the  most  brutally  offhand  evasion  in 
the  world.  Peter  was  disappointed  in  Pelham  Ford.  It  was 
altogether  different  from  those  hospital  dreams;  even  the 
weather,  to  begin  with,  was  chilly  and  unsettled.  Oswald 
had  had  a  set-back  with  his  knee,  and  had  to  keep  his  leg 
up  on  a  deck  chair;  he  could  only  limp  about  on  crutches. 
lie  seemed  older  and  more  distant  from  Peter  than  he  had 
ever  been  before;  Peter  was  obsessed  by  the  idea  that  he 
ought  to  be  treated  with  solicitude,  and  a  further  gap  was 
opened  between  them  by  Peter's  subaltern  habit  of  saying 
"Sir"  instead  of  the  old  familiar  "Nobby."  Peter  sat  be- 
side the  deck  chair  through  long  and  friendly,  but  very  im- 
patient hours;  and  he  talked  all  the  flying  shop  he  could, 
and  Oswald  talked  of  his  Africans,  and  they  went  over  the 
war  and  newspapers  again  and  again,  and  they  reverted  to 
Africa  and  flying  shop,  and  presently  they  sat  through  sev- 
eral silences,  and  at  the  end  of  one  of  them  Oswald  inquired: 
"Have  you  ever  played  chess,  Peter — or  piquet?" 

Now  chess  and  piquet  are  very  good  pastimes  in  their  way, 
but  not  good  enough  for  the  precious  afternoons  of  a  very 
animated  and  greedy  young  man  keenly  aware  that  they  are 
probably  his  last  holiday  afternoons  on  earth. 

Sentiment  requires  that  Peter  should  have  gone  to  London 
and  devoted  himself  to  adorning  the  marginal  freedom  of 
Joan 's  days.  He  did  do  this  once.  He  took  her  out  to  din- 
ner to  Jules',  in  Jermyn  Street;  he  did  her  well  there;  but 
she  was  a  very  tired  Joan  that  day ;  she  had  driven  a  good 
hundred  and  fifty  miles,  and,  truth  to  tell,  in  those  days 
Peter  did  not  like  Joan  and  she  did  not  like  herself  in  Lon- 
don, and  more  especially  in  smart  London  restaurants. 
They  sat  a  little  aloof  from  one  another,  and  about  them 
all  the  young  couples  warmed  to  another  and  smiled.  She 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      525 

jarred  with  this  atmosphere  of  meretricious  ease  and  indul- 
gence. She  had  had  110  time  to  get  back  to  Hampstead  and 
change;  she  was  at  a  disadvantage  in  her  uniform.  It  be- 
came a  hair  shirt,  a  Nessus  shirt  as  the  evening  proceeded. 
It  emphasized  the  barrier  of  seriousness  between  them  cru- 
elly. She  was  a  policeman,  a  prig,  the  harshest  thing  in  life ; 
all  those  pretty  little  cocottes  and  flirts,  with  their  little  soft 
brightnesses  and  adornments,  must  be  glancing  at  her  coarse, 
unrevealing  garments  and  noting  her  for  the  fool  she  was. 
She  felt  ugly  and  ungainly;  she  was  far  too  much  tormented 
by  love  to  handle  herself  well.  She  could  get  no  swing  and 
forgetfulness  into  the  talk.  And  about  Peter,  too,  was  a  re- 
proach for  her.  He  talked  of  work  and  the  war — as  if  in 
irony.  And  his  eyes  wandered.  Naturally,  his  eyes  wan- 
dered. 

"Good-night,  old  Peter,"  she  said  when  they  parted. 

She  lay  awake  for  two  hours,  exasperated,  miserable  be- 
yond tears,  because  she  had  not  said:  "Good  night,  old 
Peter  dear."  She  had  intended  to  say  it.  It  was  one  of 
her  prepared  effects.  But  she  was  a  weary  and  a  frozen 
young  woman.  Duty  had  robbed  her  of  the  energy  for  love. 
Why  had  she  let  things  come  to  this  pass?  Peter  was  her 
business,  and  Peter  alone.  She  damned  the  Woman's 
Legion,  Woman 's  Part  in  the  War,  and  all  the  rest  of  it,  with 
fluency  and  sincerity. 

And  while  Joan  wasted  the  hours  of  sleep  in  this  fashion 
Peter  was  also  awake  thinking  over  certain  schemes  he  had 
discussed  with  Hetty  that  afternoon.  They  involved  some 
careful  and  deliberate  lying.  The  idea  was  that  for  the 
purposes  of  Pelham  Ford  he  should  terminate  his  leave  on  the 
fourteenth  instead  of  the  twenty-first,  and  so  get  a  clear 
week  free — for  life  in  the  vein  of  Hetty. 

He  lay  fretting,  and  the  hot  greed  of  youth  persuaded 
him,  and  the  clean  honour  of  youth  reproached  him.  And 
though  he  knew  the  way  the  decision  would  go,  he  tossed 
about  and  damned  as  heartily  as  Joan. 

He  could  not  remember  if  at  Pelham  Ford  he  had  set  a 
positive  date  to  his  leave,  but,  anyhow,  it  would  not  be  dif- 
ficult to  make  out  that  there  had  been  some  sort  of  urgent 
call.  ...  It  could  be  done.  .  .  .  The  alternative  was  Piquet. 


526  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter  returned  to  Pelham  Ford  and  put  his  little  fabric 
of  lies  upon  Oswald  without  much  difficulty.  Then  at  the 
week-end  came  Joan,  rejoicing.  She  came  into  the  house 
tunmltuously;  she  had  caught  a  train  earlier  than  the  one 
they  had  expected  her  to  come  by.  ''I've  got  all  next  week. 
Seven  days,  Petah !  Never  mind  how,  but  I ' ve  got  it.  I  've 
got  it!" 

There  was  a  suggestion  as  of  some  desperate  battle  away 
there  in  London  from  which  Joan  had  snatched  these  fruits 
of  victory.  She  was  so  radiantly  glad  to  have  them  that 
Peter  recoiled  from  an  immediate  reply. 

"I  didn't  seem  to  see  you  in  London  somehow,"  said  Joan. 
"I  don't  think  you  were  really  there.  Let's  have  a  look  at 
you,  old  Petah.  Tenshun !  .  .  .  Lift  the  arm.  .  .  .  Rotate 
the  arm.  ...  It  isn't  so  bad,  Petah,  after  all.  Is  tennis 
possible  ? ' ' 

"I'd  like  to  try." 

"Boats  certainly.  No  reason  why  we  shouldn't  have  two 
or  three  long  walks.  A  week's  a  long  time  nowadays." 

"But  I  have  to  go  back  on  Monday,"  said  Peter. 

Joan  stood  stock  still. 

"Pity,  isn't  it?"  said  Peter  weakly. 

"But  why?"  she  asked  at  last  in  a  little  flat  voice. 

"I  have  to  go  back." 

"But  your  leave ?" 

"Ends  on  Monday,"  lied  Peter. 

For  some  moments  it  looked  as  though  Joan  meant  to 
make  that  last  week-end  a  black  one.  "That  doesn't  give 
us  much  time  together,"  said  Joan,  and  her  voice  which  had 
soared  now  crawled  the  earth.  .  .  .  "I'm  sorry." 

Just  for  a  moment  she  hung,  a  dark  and  wounded  Joan, 
downcast  and  thoughtful ;  and  then  turned  and  put  her  arms 
akimbo,  and  looked  at  him  and  smiled  awry.  "Well,  old 
Peter,  then  we've  got  to  make  the  best  use  of  our  time.  It's 
your  Birf  Day,  sort  of;  it's  your  Bank  Holiday,  dear;  it's 
every  blessed  thing  for  you — such  time  as  we  have  together. 
Before  they  take  you  off  again.  I  think  they're  greedy,  but 
it  can't  be  helped.  Can  it,  Peter?" 

"It  can't  be  helped,"  said  Peter.     "No." 

They  paused. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      527 

"What  shall  we  do?"  said  Joan.  "The  program's  got 
to  be  cut  down.  Shall  we  still  try  tennis?" 

"I  want  to.  I  don't  see  why  this  wrist "  He  held  it 

out  aiid  rotated  it. 

' '  Good  old  arm ! ' '  said  Joan,  and  ran  a  hand  along  it. 

"I'll  go  and  change  these  breeches  and  things,"  said  Joan. 
"And  get  myself  female.  Gods,  Peter!  the  craving  to  get 
into  clothes  that  are  really  flexible  and  translucent!" 

She  went  to  the  staircase  and  then  turned  on  Peter. 

"Peter,"  she  said. 

"Yes." 

"Go  out  and  stand  on  the  lawn  and  tighten  up  the  net. 
Now." 

"Why?" 

"Then  I  can  see  you  from  my  window  while  I'm  changing. 
I  don't  want  to  waste  a  bit  of  you." 

She  went  up  four  steps  and  stopped  and  looked  at  him 
over  her  shoulder. 

"I  want  as  much  as  I  can  get  of  you,  Petah,"  she  said. 

"I  wish  I'd  known  about  that  week,"  said  Peter  stupidly. 

"Exactly!"  said  Joan  to  herself,  and  flitted  up  the  stair- 
case. 

§  20 

Joan,  Mrs.  Moxton  perceived  that  afternoon,  had  a  swift 
and  angry  fight  with  her  summer  wardrobe.  Both  the  pink 
gingham  and  the  white  drill  had  been  tried  on  and  flung 
aside,  and  she  had  decided  at  last  upon  a  rather  jolly  warm 
blue  figured  voile  with  a  belt  of  cherry -coloured  ribbon  that 
suited  her  brown  skin  and  black  hair  better  than  those 
weaker  supports.  She  had  evidently  opened  every  drawer 
in  her  room  in  a  hasty  search  for  white  silk  stockings. 

When  she  came  out  into  the  sunshine  of  the  garden  Peter's 
eyes  told  her  she  had  guessed  the  right  costume. 

Oswald  was  standing  up  on  his  crutches  and  smiling,  and 
Peter  was  throwing  up  a  racquet  and  catching  it  again  with 
one  hand. 

"Thank  God  for  a  left-handed  childhood!"  said  Peter. 
"I'm  going  to  smash  you,  Joan." 


528  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"I  forgot  about  that,"  said  Joan.  "But  you  aren't  going 
to  smash  me,  old  Petah. " 

When  tea-time  came  they  were  still  fighting  the  seventh 
vantage  game,  and  Joan  was  up. 

They  came  and  sat  at  the  tea-table,  and  Joan  as  she  poured 
the  tea  reflected  that  a  young  man  in  white  flannels,  flushed 
and  a  little  out  of  breath,  with  his  white  silk  shirt  wide  open 
at  the  neck,  was  a  more  beautiful  thing  than  the  most  beauti- 
ful woman  alive.  And  her  dark  eyes  looked  at  the  careless 
and  exhausted  Peter,  that  urgent  and  insoluble  problem, 
while  she  counted,  " Twenty-four,  thirty-six,  forty-one — 
about  forty-one  hours.  How  the  devil  shall  I  do  it?" 

It  wasn't  to  be  done  at  tennis  anyhow,  and  she  lost  the 
next  three  games  running  without  apparent  effort,  and  took 
Peter  by  the  arm  and  walked  him  about  the  garden,  discours- 
ing on  flying.  "I  must  teach  you  to  fly,"  said  Peter. 
"Often  when  I've  been  up  alone  I've  thought,  'Some  day 
I'll  teach  old  Joan.'  ' 

"That's  a  promise,  Petah." 

"Sure,"  said  Peter,  who  had  not  suffered  next  to  two 
Americans  for  nothing." 

"I've  got  it  in  writing,"  said  Joan. 

"I'd  rather  learn  from  you  than  any  one,"  said  she. 

Peter  discoursed  of  stunts.  .  .  . 

They  spent  a  long  golden  time  revisiting  odd  corners  in 
which  they  had  played  together.  They  went  clown  the  vil- 
lage and  up  to  the  church  and  round  the  edge  of  the  wood, 
and  there  they  came  upon  and  devoured  a  lot  of  blackberries, 
and  then  they  went  down  to  the  mill  pond  and  sat  for  a  time 
in  Baker's  boat.  Then  they  got  at  cross  purposes  about 
dressing  for  dinner.  Joan  wanted  to  dress  very  much. 
She  wanted  to  remind  Peter  that  there  were  prettier  arms  in 
the  world  than  Hetty  Reinhart's,  and  a  better  modelled  neck 
and  shoulders.  She  had  a  new  dress  of  ivory  silk  with  a 
broad  belt  of  velvet  that  echoed  the  bright  softness  of  her 
eyes  and  hair.  But  Peter  would  not  let  her  dress.  He  did 
not  want  to  dress  himself.  "And  you  couldn't  look  prettier, 
Joan,  than  you  do  in  that  blue  thing.  It's  so  like  you." 

And  as  Joan  couldn't  explain  that  the  frock  kept  her  a 
jolly  girl  he  knew  while  the  dress  would  have  shown  him  the 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      529 

beautiful  woman  he  had  to  discover,  she  lost  that  point  in 
the  game.  And  tomorrow  was  Sunday,  when  Pelham  Ford 
after  the  good  custom  of  England  never  dressed  for  dinner. 

Afterwards  she  thought  how  easily  she  might  have  over- 
ruled him. 

Joan's  plans  for  the  evening  were  dashed  by  this  costume 
failure.  She  had  relied  altogether  on  the  change  of  person- 
ality into  something  rich  and  strange,  that  the  ivory  dress 
was  to  have  wrought.  She  could  do  nothing  to  develop  the 
situation.  Everything  seemed  to  be  helping  to  intensify  her 
sisterliness.  Oswald  was  rather  seedy,  and  the  three  of  them 
played  Auction  Bridge  with  a  dummy.  She  had  meant  to 
sit  up  with  Peter,  but  it  didn't  work  out  like  that. 

"Good  night,  Petah  dear,"  she  said  outside  her  bedroom 
door  with  the  candle-light  shining  red  between  the  fingers 
of  her  hand. 

"Good  night,  old  Joan,"  he  said  from  his  door-mat,  with 
an  infinite  friendliness  in  his  voice. 

You  cannot  kiss  a  man  good  night  suddenly  when  he  is 
fifteen  yards  away.  .  .  . 

She  closed  the  door  behind  her  softly,  put  down  her  can- 
dle, and  began  to  walk  about  her  room  and  swear  in  an  en- 
tirely unladylike  fashion.  Then  she  went  over  to  the  open 
window,  wringing  her  hands.  "How  am  I  to  do  it?"  she 
said.  "How  am  I  to  do  it?  The  situation's  preposterous. 
He's  mine.  And  I  might  be  his  sister!" 

"Shall  I  make  a  declaration?" 

"I  suppose  Hetty  did." 

But  all  the  cunning  of  Joan  was  unavailing  against  the 
invisble  barriers  to  passion  between  herself  and  Peter.  They 
spent  a  long  Sunday  of  comradeship,  and  courage  and  oppor- 
tunity alike  failed.  The  dawn  on  Monday  morning  found  a 
white  and  haggard  Joan  pacing  her  floor,  half  minded  to 
attempt  a  desperate  explanation  forthwith  in  Peter's  bed- 
room with  a  suddenly  awakened  Peter.  Only  her  fear  of 
shocking  him  and  failing  restrained  her.  She  raved.  She 
indulged  in  absurd  soliloquys  and  still  absurder  prayers. 
"Oh,  God,  give  me  my  Peter,"  she  prayed.  "  Give  me 
my  P  et  er  !  " 


530  JOAN  AND  PETER 

§  21 

Monday  broke  clear  and  fine,  with  a  September  freshness 
in  the  sunshine.  Breakfast  was  an  awkward  meal;  Peter 
was  constrained,  Oswald  was  worried  by  a  sense  of  advice 
and  counsels  not  given ;  Joan  felt  the  situation  slipping  from 
her  helpless  grasp.  It  was  with  a  sense  of  relief  that  at  last 
she  put  on  her  khaki  overcoat  to  drive  Peter  to  the  station. 
"This  is  the  end,"  sang  in  Joan's  mind.  "This  is  the  end." 
She  glanced  at  the  mirror  in  the  hall  and  saw  that  the  fur 
collar  was  not  unfriendly  to  her  white  neck  and  throat. 
She  was  in  despair,  but  she  did  not  mean  to  let  it  become  an 
unbecoming  despair — at  least  until  Peter  had  departed.  The 
end  was  still  incomplete.  She  had  something  stern  and  un- 
pleasant to  say  to  Peter  before  they  parted,  but  she  did  not 
mean  to  look  stern  or  unpleasant  while  she  said  it.  Peter, 
she  noted  with  a  gleam  of  satisfaction,  was  in  low  spirits. 
He  was  sorry  to  go.  He  was  ashamed  of  himself,  but  also 
he  was  sorry.  That  was  something,  at  any  rate,  to  have 
achieved.  But  he  was  going — nevertheless. 

She  brought  round  the  little  Singer  to  the  door.  She 
started  the  engine  with  a  competent  swing  and  got  in.  The 
maids  came  with  Peter's  portmanteau  and  belongings. 
"This  is  the  end,"  said  Joan  to  herself,  touching  her  ac- 
celerator and  with  her  hand  ready  to  release  the  brake. 
"All  aboard?"  said  Joan  aloud. 

Peter  shook  hands  with  Oswald  over  the  side  of  the  car, 
and  glanced  from  him  to  the  house  and  back  at  him.  "I 
wish  I  could  stay  longer,  sir,"  said  Peter. 

"There's  many  days  to  come  yet,"  said  Oswald.  For  we 
never  mention  death  before  death  in  war  time ;  we  never  let 
ourselves  think  of  it  before  it  comes  or  after  it  has  come. 

"So  long,  Nobby!" 

"Good  luck,  Peter!" 

Joan  put  the  car  into  gear,  and  steered  out  into  the  road. 

"The  water-splash  is  lower  than  ever  I've  seen  it,"  said 
Peter. 

They  ran  down  the  road  to  the  station  almost  in  silence. 
"These  poplars  have  got  a  touch  of  autumn  in  them  al- 
ready," said  Peter. 


531 

"It's  an  early  year,"  said  Joan. 

"The  end,  the  end!"  sang  the  song  in  Joan's  brain. 
"But  I'll  tell  him  all  the  same."  .  .  . 

But  she  did  not  tell  him  until  they  could  hear  the  sound 
of  the  approaching  train  that  was  to  cut  the  thread  of  every- 
thing for  Joan.  They  walked  together  up  the  little  platform 
to  the  end. 

"I'm  sorry  you're  going,"  said  Joan. 

"I'm  infernally  sorry.  If  I'd  known  you'd  get  this 
week ' ' 

"Would  that  have  altered  it?"  she  said  sharply. 

"No.  I  suppose  it  wouldn't,"  he  fenced,  just  in  time  to 
save  himself. 

The  rattle  of  the  approaching  train  grew  suddenly  loud. 
It  was  round  the  bend. 

Joan  spoke  in  a  perfectly  even  voice.  "I  know  you  have 
been  lying,  Peter.  I  have  known  it  all  this  week-end.  I 
know  your  leave  lasts  until  the  twenty-first." 

He  stared  at  her  in  astonishment. 

"There  was  a  time.  ...  It's  to  think  of  all  this  dirt 
upon  you  that  hurts  most.  The  lies,  the  dodges,  the  shuf- 
fling meanness  of  it.  From  you.  .  .  .  Whom  /  love." 

A  gap  of  silence  came.  To  the  old  porter  twelve  yards 
off  they  seemed  entirely  well-behaved  and  well-disciplined 
young  people,  saying  nothing  in  particular.  The  train  came 
in  with  a  sort  of  wink  under  the  bridge,  and  the  engine  and 
foremost  carriages  ran  past  them  up  the  platform. 

"I  wish  I  could  explain.  I  didn't  know The  fact  is 

I  got  entangled  in  a  sort  of  promise.  ..." 

"Hetty!"  Joan  jerked  out,  and  "There's  an  empty  first 
for  you." 

The  train  stopped. 

Peter  put  his  hand  on  the  handle  of  the  carriage 
door. 

"You  go  to  London — like  a  puppy  that  rolls  in  dirt. 
You  go  to  beastliness  and  vulgarity.  .  .  .  You'd  better  get 
in,  Peter." 

"But  look  here,  Joan!" 

"Get  in!"  she  scolded  to  his  hesitation,  and  stamped  her 
foot. 


532  JOAN  AND  PETER 

He  got  in  mechanically,  and  she  closed  the  door  on  him 
and  turned  the  handle  and  stood  holding  it. 

Then  still  speaking  evenly  and  quietly,  she  said: 
"You're  a  blind  fool,  Peter.  What  sort  of  love  can  that — 
that — that  miscellany  give  you,  that  I  couldn't  give?  Have 
I  no  life?  Have  I  no  beauty?  Are  you  afraid  of  me! 
Don't  you  see — don't  you  see?  You  go  off  to  that!  You 
trail  yourself  in  the  dirt  and  you  trail  my  love  in  the  dirt. 
Before  a  female  hack !  .  .  . 

"Look  at  me!"  she  cried,  holding  her  hands  apart. 
"Think  of  me  tonight.  .  .  .  Tours!  Yours  for  the  taking !" 

The  train  was  moving. 

She  walked  along  the  platform  to  keep  pace  with  him, 
and  her  eyes  held  his.  "Peter,"  she  said;  and  then  with 
amazing  quiet  intensity:  "You  damned  fool!" 

She  hesitated  on  the  verge  of  saying  something  more. 
She  came  towards  the  carriage.  It  wasn't  anything  pleas- 
ant that  she  had  in  mind,  to  judge  by  her  expression. 

"Stand  away  please,  miss!"  said  the  old  porter,  hurrying 
up  to  intervene.  She  abandoned  that  last  remark  with  an 
impatient  gesture. 

Peter  sat  still.  The  end  of  the  station  ran  by  like  a  scene 
in  a  panorama.  Her  Medusa  face  had  slid  away  to  the  edge 
of  the  picture  that  the  window  framed,  and  vanished. 

For  some  seconds  he  was  too  amazed  to  move. 

Then  he  got  up  heavily  and  stuck  his  head  out  of  the  win- 
dow to  stare  at  Joan. 

Joan  was  standing  quite  still  with  her  hands  in  the  side 
pockets  of  her  khaki  overcoat;  she  was  standing  straight  as 
a  rod,  with  her  heels  together,  looking  at  the  receding  train. 
She  never  moved.  .  .  . 

Neither  of  these  two  young  people  made  a  sign  to  each 
other,  which  was  the  first  odd  thing  the  old  porter  noted 
about  them.  They  just  stared.  By  all  the  rules  they  should 
have  waved  handkerchiefs.  The  next  odd  thing  was  that 
Joan  stared  at  the  bend  for  half  a  minute  perhaps  after  the 
train  had  altogether  gone,  and  then  tried  to  walk  out  to  her 
car  by  the  little  white  gate  at  the  ond  of  the  platform  which 
had  been  disused  and  nailed  up  for  throe  years.  .  .  . 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      533 

§  22 

After  Oswald  had  seen  the  car  whisk  through  the  gates  into 
the  road,  and  after  he  had  rested  on  his  crutches  staring  at 
the  gates  for  a  time,  he  had  hobbled  back  to  his  study.  He 
wanted  to  work,  but  he  found  it  difficult  to  fix  his  attention. 
He  was  thinking  of  Joan  and  Peter,  and  for  the  first  time  in 
his  life  he  was  wondering  why  they  had  never  fallen  in  love 
with  each  other.  They  seemed  such  good  company  for  each 
other.  .  .  . 

He  was  still  engaged  upon  these  speculations  half  an  hour 
or  so  later,  when  he  heard  the  car  return  and  presently  saw 
Joan  go  past  his  window.  She  was  flushed,  and  she  was 
staring  in  front  of  her  at  nothing  in  particular.  He  had 
never  seen  Joan  looking  so  unhappy.  In  fact,  so  strong  was 
his  impression  that  she  was  unhappy  that  he  doubted  it, 
and  he  went  to  the  window  and  craned  out  after  her. 

She  was  going  straight  up  towards  the  arbour.  With  a 
slight  hurry  in  her  steps.  She  had  her  fur  collar  half 
turned  up  on  one  side,  her  hands  were  deep  in  her  pockets, 
and  something  about  her  dogged  walk  reminded  him  of  some 
long-forgotten  moment,  years  ago  it  must  have  been,  when 
Joan,  in  hot  water  for  some  small  offence,  had  been  sent  in- 
doors at  The  Ingle-Nook. 

He  limped  back  to  his  chair  and  sat  thinking  her  over. 

"I  wonder,"  he  said  at  last,  and  turned  to  his  work 
again.  .  .  . 

There  was  no  getting  on  with  it.  Half  an  hour  later  he 
accepted  defeat.  " Peter  has  knocked  us  all  crooked,"  he 
said.  ' '  There 's  no  work  for  today. 

He  would  go  out  and  prowl  round  the  place  and  look  at 
the  roses.  Perhaps  Joan  would  come  and  talk.  But  at  the 
gates  he  was  amazed  to  encounter  Peter. 

It  was  Peter,  hot  and  dusty  from  a  walk  of  three  miles, 
and  carrying  his  valise  with  an  aching  left  arm.  There  was 
a  look  of  defiance  in  the  eyes  that  stared  fiercely  out  from 
under  the  perspiration-matted  hair  upon  his  forehead.  He 
seemed  to  find  Oswald's  appearance  the  complete  confirma- 
tion of  the  most  disagreeable  anticipations.  Thoughts  of 
panic  and  desertion  flashed  upon  Oswald's  mind. 


534  JOAN  AND  PETER 

' '  Good  God,  Peter ! "  he  cried.     ' '  What  brings  you  back  ? ' ' 

' '  I  Ve  come  back  for  another  week, ' '  said  Peter. 

' '  But  your  leave 's  up ! " 

"I  told  a  lie,  sir.    I've  got  another  week." 

Oswald  stared  at  his  ward. 

"  I'm  sorry,  sir, ' '  said  Peter.  ' '  I  Ve  been  making  a  fool  of 
myself.  I  thought  better  of  it.  I  got  out  of  the  train  at 
Standon  and  walked  back  here." 

"What  does  it  mean,  Peter?"  said  Oswald. 

Peter's  eyes  were  the  most  distressed  eyes  he  had  ever 
seen.  "If  you'd  just  not  ask,  sir,  now ' 

It  is  a  good  thing  to  deal  with  one 's  own  blood  in  a  crisis. 
Oswald,  resting  thoughtfully  on  his  crutches,  leapt  to  a 
kind  of  understanding. 

"  I  'm  going  to  hop  down  towards  the  village,  Peter, ' '  said 
Oswald,  becoming  casual  in  his  manner.  "I  want  some  ex- 
ercise. ...  If  you'll  tell  every  one  you're  back." 

He  indicated  the  house  behind  him  by  a  movement  of  his 
head. 

Peter  was  badly  blown  with  haste  and  emotion.  "Thank 
you,  sir,"  he  said  shortly. 

Oswald  stepped  past  him  and  stared  down  the  road. 

"Mrs.  Moxton's  in  the  house,"  he  said  without  looking 
at  Peter  again.  "Joan's  up  the  garden.  See  you  when  I 
get  back,  Peter.  .  .  .  Glad  you've  got  another  week,  any- 
how. ...  So  long.  ..." 

He  left  Peter  standing  in  the  gateway. 

Fear  came  upon  Peter.  He  stood  quite  still  for  some  mo- 
ments, looking  at  the  house  and  the  cedars.  He  dropped  his 
valise  at  the  front  door  and  mopped  his  face.  Then  he 
walked  slowly  across  the  lawn  towards  the  terraces.  He 
wanted  to  shout,  and  found  himself  hoarse.  Then  on  the 
first  terrace  he  got  out:  "Jo-un!"  in  a  flat  croak.  He  had 
to  cry  again:  "Jo-un!"  before  it  sounded  at  all  like  the 
old  style. 

Joan  became  visible.  She  had  come  out  of  the  arbour  at 
the  top  of  the  garden,  and  she  was  standing  motionless,  re- 
garding him  down  the  vista  of  the  central  path.  She  was 
white  and  rather  dishevelled,  and  she  stood  quite  still. 

Peter  walked  up  the  steps  towards  her. 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      535 

"I've  come  back,  Joan,"  he  said,  as  he  drew  near.  "I 
want  to  talk  to  you  .  .  .  Come  into  the  arbour." 

He  took  her  arm  clumsily  and  led  her  back  into  the  ar- 
bour out  of  sight  of  the  house.  Then  he  dropped  her  arm. 

"Joan,"  he  said,  "I've  been  the  damndest  of  fools  .  .  . 
as  you  said.  ...  I  don't  know  why."  .  .  . 

He  stood  before  her  awkwardly.  He  was  trembling  vio- 
lently. He  thought  he  was  going  to  weep. 

He  could  not  touch  her  again.  He  did  not  dare  to  touch 
her. 

Then  Joan  spread  out  her  arms  straight  and  stood  like  a 
crucifix.  Her  face,  which  had  been  a  dark  stare,  softened 
swiftly,  became  radiant,  dissolved  into  a  dusky  glow  of 
tears  and  triumph.  "Oh!  Petah  my  darling,"  she  sobbed, 
and  seized  him  and  kissed  him  with  tearsalt  lips  and  hugged 
him  to  herself. 

The  magic  barrier  was  smashed  at  last.  Peter  held  her 
close  to  him  and  kissed  her.  .  .  . 

It  was  the  second  time  they  had  kissed  since  those  black 
days  at  High  Cross  school.  .  .  . 

§  23 

Those  were  years  of  swift  mam-ings,  and  Peter  was  a 
young  married  man  when  presently  he  was  added  to  the 
number  of  that  select  company  attached  to  sausage-shaped 
observation  balloons  who  were  sent  up  in  the  mornings  and 
pulled  down  at  nights  along  the  British  front.  He  had  had 
only  momentary  snatches  of  matrimony  before  the  front  had 
called  him  back  to  its  own  destructive  interests,  but  his  ex- 
periences had  banished  any  lingering  vestiges  of  his  theory 
that  there  is  one  sort  of  woman  you  respect  and  another 
sort  you  make  love  to.  There  was  only  one  sort  of  woman  to 
love  or  respect,  and  that  was  Joan.  He  was  altogether  in 
love  with  Joan,  he  was  sure  he  had  never  been  in  love  be- 
fore, and  he  was  now  also  extravagantly  in  love  with  life. 
He  wanted  to  go  on  with  it,  with  a  passionate  intensity.  It 
seemed  to  him  that  it  was  not  only  beginning  for  him,  but 
for  every  one.  Hitherto  Man  had  been  living  down  there, 
down  on  those  flats — for  all  the  world  is  flat  from  the  air. 


536  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Now,  at  last,  men  were  beginning  to  feel  how  they  might 
soar  over  all  ancient  limitations. 

Occasionally  he  thought  of  such  things  up  in  his  basket, 
sitting  like  a  spectator  in  a  box  at  a  theatre,  with  the  slow 
vast  drama  of  the  western  front  spread  out  like  a  map  be- 
neath his  eyes,  with  half  Belgium  and  a  great  circle  of 
France  in  sight,  the  brown,  ruined  country  on  either  side  of 
No  Man's  Land,  apparently  lifeless,  with  its  insane  tangle 
of  trenches  and  communicating  ways  below,  with  the  crum- 
bling heaps  of  ruined  towns  and  villages  scattered  among 
canals  and  lakes  of  flood  water,  and  passing  insensibly  into 
a  green  and  normal-looking  landscape  to  the  west  and  east, 
where  churches  still  had  towers  and  houses  roofs,  and  woods 
were  lumps  and  blocks  of  dark  green,  fields  manifestly  cul- 
tivated patches,  and  roads  white  ribbons  barred  by  the  pur- 
ple poplar  shadows.  But  these  spectacular  and  speculative 
phases  were  rare.  They  came  only  when  a  thin  veil  of  haze 
made  the  whole  spacious  prospect  faint,  so  that  beyond  his 
more  immediate  circle  Peter  could  see  only  the  broad  out- 
lines of  the  land.  Given  worse  conditions  of  the  weather 
and  he  would  be  too  uncomfortable  for  philosophy;  given 
better  and  he  would  be  too  busy. 

He  sat  on  a  canvas  seat  inside  the  square  basket  with  his 
instruments  about  him,  or  leant  over  the  side  scrutinizing 
the  details  of  the  eastward  landscape.  Upon  his  head,  over 
his  ears,  he  wore  a  telephone  receiver,  and  about  his  body 
was  a  rope  harness  that  linked  him  by  a  rope  to  the  silk 
parachute  that  was  packed  neatly  in  a  little  swinging  bucket 
over  the  side  of  his  basket.  Under  his  hand  was  his  map 
board,  repeating  the  shapes  of  wood  and  water  and  road 
below.  The  telephone  wire  that  ran  down  his  mooring  rope 
abolished  any  effect  of  isolation ;  it  linked  him  directly  to 
his  winch  on  a  lorry  below,  to  a  number  of  battery  comman- 
ders, to  an  ascending  series  of  headquarters;  he  could  always 
start  a  conversation  if  he  had  anything  practical  to  say. 
He  was,  in  fact,  an  eye  at  the  end  of  a  tentacle  thread,  by 
means  of  which  the  British  army  watched  its  enemies. 
Sometimes  he  had  an  illusion  that  he  was  also  a  kind  of 
brain.  When  distant  visibility  was  good  he  would  find  him- 
self hovering  over  the  war  as  a  player  hangs  over  a  chess- 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      537 

board,  directing  fire  upon  road  movements  or  train  move- 
ments, suspecting  and  watching  for  undisclosed  enemy  bat- 
teries, or  directing  counter-battery  fire.  Above  him,  green 
and  voluminous,  hung  the  great  translucent  lobes  of  his  gas 
bag,  and  the  loose  ropes  by  which  it  was  towed  and  held  upon 
the  ground  swayed  and  trailed  about  his  basket. 

It  was  on  one  of  his  more  slack  afternoons  that  Peter 
fell  thinking  of  how  acutely  he  now  desired  to  live.  The 
wide  world  was  full  of  sunshine,  but  a  ground  haze  made 
even  the  country  immediately  below  him  indistinct.  The 
enemy  gunners  were  inactive,  there  came  no  elfin  voices 
through  the  telephone,  only  far  away  to  the  south  guns  butted 
and  shivered  the  tranquil  air.  There  was  a  faint  drift  in 
the  air  rather  than  a  breeze,  and  the  gas  bag  had  fallen  into 
a  long,  lazy  rhythmic  movement,  so  that  sometimes  he  faced 
due  south  and  sometimes  south  by  east  and  so  back.  A  great 
patch  of  flooded  country  to  the  north-east,  a  bright  mirror 
with  a  kind  of  bloom  upon  it,  seemed  trying  with  an  aimless 
persistency  to  work  its  way  towards  the  centre  of  his  field 
of  vision  and  never  succeeding. 

For  a  time  Peter  had  been  preoccupied  with  a  distant 
ridge  far  away  to  the  east,  from  which  a  long-range  gun 
had  recently  taken  to  shelling  the  kite  balloons  towards  eve- 
ning as  they  became  clear  against  the  bright  western  sky. 
Four  times  lately  this  new  gun  had  got  on  to  him,  and  this 
clear  and  tranquil  afternoon  promised  just  the  luminous 
and  tranquil  sunset  that  favoured  these  unpleasant  activi- 
ties. It  was  five  hours  to  sunset  yet,  but  Peter  could  not 
keep  his  mind  off:  that  gun.  It  was  a  big  gun ;  perhaps  a  42 
centimetre;  it  was  beyond  any  counter-battery  possibility, 
and  it  had  got  a  new  kind  of  shell  that  the  Germans  seemed 
to  have  invented  for  the  particular  discomfort  of  Peter  and 
his  kind.  It  had  a  distinctive  report,  a  loud  crack,  and  then 
the  "whuff"  of  high  explosive,  and  at  every  explosion  it  got 
nearer  and  nearer  to  its  target,  with  a  quite  uncanny  cer- 
tainty. It  seemed  to  learn  more  than  any  gun  should  learn 
from  each  shot.  It  was  this  steadfast  approach  to  a  hit 
that  Peter  disliked.  That  and  the  long  pause  after  the  shell 
had  started.  Far  away  he  would  see  the  flash  of  the  gun 
amidst  the  ridges  in  the  darkling  east.  Then  would  come 


538  JOAN  AND  PETER 

a  long,  blank  pause  of  expectation.  For  all  he  could  tell 
this  might  get  him.  Then  the  whine  of  the  shell  would  be- 
come audible,  growing  louder  and  louder  and  lower  and 
lower  in  note;  Phee-whoo!  Crack!  WHOOF!  Then  Peter 
would  get  quite  voluble  to  the  men  at  the  winch  below.  He 
could  let  himself  up,  or  go  down  a  few  hundred  feet,  or 
they  could  shift  his  lorry  along  the  road.  Until  it  was  dark 
he  could  not  come  down,  for  a  kite  balloon  is  a  terribly 
visible  and  helpless  thing  on  the  ground  until  it  has  been 
very  carefully  put  to  bed.  To  come  down  in  the  daylight 
meant  too  good  a  chance  for  the  nearer  German  guns.  So 
Peter,  by  instructing  his  winch  to  lower  him  or  let  him  up 
or  shift,  had  to  dodge  about  in  a  most  undignified  way,  up 
and  down  and  backwards  and  sideways,  while  the  big  gun 
marked  him  and  guessed  at  his  next  position.  Flash!  "Oh, 
damn!"  said  Peter.  "Another  already!" 

Silence.  Anticipations.  Then:  Phee — eee — eee — whoo. 
Crack!  WHOOF!  A  rush  of  air  would  set  the  gas  bag 
swinging.  That  was  a  near  one ! 

"Where  aw  I?"  said  Peter. 

But  that  wasn  't  going  to  happen  for  hours  yet.  Why  meet 
trouble  half  way?  Why  be  tormented  by  this  feeling  of  ap- 
prehension and  danger  in  the  still  air?  Why  trouble  be- 
cause the  world  was  quiet  and  seemed  to  be  waiting?  Why 
not  think  of  something  else?  Banish  this  war  from  the 
mind.  .  .  .  Was  he  more  afraid  nowadays  then  he  used  to 
be?  Peter  was  inclined  to  think  that  now  he  was  more  sys- 
tematically afraid.  Formerly  he  had  funked  in  streaks  and 
patches,  but  now  he  had  a  steady,  continuous  dislike  to  all 
these  risks  and  dangers.  He  was  getting  more  and  more 
clearly  an  idea  of  the  sort  of  life  he  wanted  to  lead  and  of 
the  things  he  wanted  to  do.  He  was  ceasing  to  think  of 
existence  as  a  rather  aimless  series  of  adventures,  and  com- 
ing to  regard  it  as  one  large  consecutive  undertaking  on  the 
part  of  himself  and  Joan.  This  being  hung  up  in  the  sky 
for  Germans  to  shoot  at  seemed  to  him  to  be  a  very  tiresome 
irrelevance  indeed.  He  and  Joan  and  everybody  with  brains 
— including  the  misguided  people  who  had  made  and  were 
now  firing  this  big  gun  at  him — ought  to  be  setting  to  work 
to  get  this  preposterous  muddle  of  a  world  in  order.  "This 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      539 

sort  of  thing,"  said  Peter,  addressing  the  western  front,  his 
gas  bag,  and  so  much  of  the  sky  as  it  permitted  him  to  see, 
and  the  universe  generally,  ''is  ridiculous.  There  is  no  sense 
in  it  at  all.  None  whatever." 

His  dream  of  God,  as  a  detached  and  aloof  personage, 
had  taken  a  very  strong  hold  upon  his  imagination.  Or, 
perhaps,  it  would  be  truer  to  say  that  his  fevered  mind  in 
the  hospital  had  given  a  caricature  personality  to  ideas  that 
had  grown  up  in  his  mind  as  a  natural  consequence  of  his 
training.  He  had  gone  on  with  that  argument ;  he  went  on 
with  it  now,  with  a  feeling  that  really  he  was  just  as  much 
sitting  and  talking  in  that  queer,  untidy,  out-of-the  way 
office  as  swaying  in  a  kite  balloon,  six  thousand  feet  above 
Flanders,  waiting  to  be  shot  at. 

"It  is  all  very  well  to  say  'exert  yourself,'  "  said  Peter. 
"But  there  is  that  chap  over  there  exerting  himself.  And 
what  he  is  doing  with  all  his  brains  is  just  trying  to  wipe 
my  brains  out  of  existence.  Just  that.  He  hasn't  an  idea 
else  of  what  he  is  doing.  Pie  has  no  notion  of  what  he  is  up 
to  or  what  I  am  up  to.  And  he  hasn't  the  sense  or  ability  to 
come  over  here  and  talk  about  it  to  me.  He's  there — at  that 
— and  he  can't  help  himself.  And  I'm  here — and  I  can't 
help  myself.  But  if  I  could  only  catch  him  within  counter 
battery  range ! 

"There's  no  sense  in  it  at  all,"  summarized  Peter,  after 
some  moments  of  grim  reflection.  ' '  Sense  hasn  't  got  into  it. ' ' 

"Is  sense  ever  going  to  get  into  it? 

"The  curious  thing  about  you,"  said  Peter,  addressing 
himself  quite  directly  to  his  Deity  at  the  desk,  "is  that  some- 
how, without  ever  positively  promising  it  or  saying  anything 
plain  and  definite  about  it,  you  yet  manage  to  convey  in  an 
almost  irresistible  manner,  that  there  is  going  to  be  sense  in 
it.  You  seem  to  suggest  that  my  poor  brain  up  here  and  the 
brains  of  those  chaps  over  there,  are,  in  spite  of  all  appear- 
ance to  the  contrary,  up  to  something  jointly  that  is  going 
to  come  together  and  make  good  some  day.  You  hint  it. 
And  yet  I  don't  get  a  scrap  of  sound,  trustworthy  reasoning 
to  help  me  to  accept  that ;  not  a  scrap.  Why  should  it  be 
so?  I  ask,  and  you  just  keep  on  not  saying  anything.  I  sup- 
pose it's  a  necessary  thing,  biologically,  that  one  should 


540  JOAN  AND  PETER 

have  a  kind  of  optimism  to  keep  one  alive,  so  I'm  not  even 
justified  in  my  half  conviction  that  I'm  not  being  absolutely 
fooled  by  life.  .  .  . 

"I  admit  that  taking  for  example  Joan,  there  is  some- 
thing about  Joan  that  almost  persuades  me  there  must  be 
something  absolutely  right  about  things — for  Joan  to  hap- 
pen at  all.  Yet  isn't  that  again  just  another  biologically 
necessary  delusion?  .  .  .  There  you  sit  silent.  You  seem  to 
say  nothing,  and  yet  you  soak  me  with  a  kind  of  answer,  a 
sort  of  shapeless  courage.  ..." 

Peter's  mind  rested  on  that  for  a  time,  and  then  began 
again  at  another  point. 

"I  wonder,"  said  Peter,  "if  that  chap  gets  me  tonight, 
what  I  shall  think — in  the  moment — after  he  has  got 
me.  .  .  ." 

§  24 

But  the  German  gunner  never  got  Peter,  because  some- 
thing else  got  him  first. 

He  thought  he  saw  a  Hun  aeroplane  coming  over  very 
high  indeed  to  the  south  of  him,  fifteen  thousand  feet  up  or 
more,  a  mere  speck  in  the  blue  blaze,  and  then  the  gas  bag 
hid  it  and  he  dismissed  it  from  his  mind.  He  was  thinking 
that  the  air  was  growing  clearer,  and  that  if  this  went  on 
guns  would  wake  up  presently  and  little  voices  begin  to  talk 
to  him,  when  he  became  aware  of  the  presence  and  vibration 
of  an  aeroplane  quite  close  to  him.  He  pulled  off  his  tele- 
phone receivers  and  heard  the  roar  of  an  engine  close  at  hand. 
It  was  overhead,  and  the  gas  bag  still  hid  it.  At  the  same 
moment  the  British  anti-aircraft  gunners  began  a  belated 
fire.  "Damn!"  said  Peter  in  a  brisk  perspiration,  and 
hastened  to  make  sure  that  his  parachute  rope  was  clear. 

"Perhaps  he's  British,"  said  Peter,  with  no  real  hope. 

"Pap,  pap,  pap!"  very  loud  overhead. 

The  gas  bag  swayed  and  billowed,  and  a  wing  with  a  black 
cross  swept  across  the  sky.  "Pap,  pap,  pap." 

The  gas  bag  wrinkled  and  crumpled  more  and  more,  and 
a  little  streak  of  smoke  appeared  beyond  its  edge.  The  Ger- 
man aeroplane  was  now  visible,  a  hundred  yards  away,  and 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      541 

banking  to  come  round.     He  had  fired  the  balloon  with  tracer 
bullets. 

The  thing  that  Peter  had  to  do  and  what  he  did  was  this. 
He  had  to  step  up  on  to  a  little  wood  step  inside  his  basket. 
Then  he  had  to  put  first  one  foot  and  then  the  other  on  to 
another  little  step  outside  his  basket.  This  little  step  was 
about  four  inches  wide  by  nine  long.  Below  it  was  six 
thousand  feet  of  emptiness,  above  the  little  trees  and  houses 
below.  As  he  swayed  on  the  step  Peter  had  to  make  sure 
that  the  rope  attached  to  his  body  was  clear  of  all  entangle- 
ments. Then  he  had  to  step  off  that  little  shelf,  which  was 
now  swinging  and  slanting  with  the  lurching  basket  to  which 
it  was  attached,  into  the  void,  six  thousand  feet  above  the 
earth. 

He  had  not  to  throw  himself  or  dive  headlong,  because 
that  might  lead  to  entanglement  with  the  rope.  He  had  just 
to  step  off  into  pellucid  nothingness,  holding  his  rope  clear 
of  himself  with  one  hand.  This  rope  looped  back  to  the 
little  swinging  bucket  in  which  his  fine  silk  parachute  was 
closely  packed.  He  had  seen  it  packed  a  week  ago,  and  he 
wished  now,  as  he  stood  on  his  step  holding  to  his  basket  with 
one  hand,  that  he  had  watched  the  process  more  meticulously. 
He  became  aware  that  the  Hun,  having  disposed  of  the  bal- 
loon, was  now  shooting  at  him.  He  did  not  so  much  step  off 
the  little  shelf  as  slip  off  as  it  heeled  over  with  the  swing  of 
the  basket.  The  first  instants  of  a  leap  or  fall  make  no  im- 
pression on  the  mind.  For  some  seconds  he  was  falling 
swiftly,  feet  foremost,  through  the  air.  He  scarcely  noted 
the  faint  snatch  when  the  twine,  which  held  his  parachute  in 
its  basket,  broke.  Then  his  consciousness  began  to  register 
again.  He  kept  his  feet  tightly  pressed  together.  The  air 
whistled  by  him,  but  he  thought  that  dreams  and  talk  had 
much  exaggerated  the  sensations  of  falling.  He  was  too  high 
as  yet  to  feel  the  rush  of  the  ground  towards  him. 

He  seemed  to  fall  for  an  interminable  time  before  anything 
more  happened.  He  was  assailed  by  doubts — whether  the 
twine  that  kept  the  parachute  in  its  bucket  would  break, 
whether  it  would  open.  His  rope  trailed  out  above  him. 

Still  falling.  Why  didn't  the  parachute  open?  In  an- 
other ten  seconds  it  would  be  too  late. 


542  JOAN  AND  PETER 

The  parachute  was  not  opening.  It  was  certainly  not 
opening.  Wrong  packing?  He  tugged  and  jerked  his  rope, 
and  tried  to  shake  and  swing  the  long  silken  folds  that  were 
following  his  fall.  Why?  Why  the  devil ? 

The  rope  seemed  to  tighten  abruptly.  The  harness  tight- 
ened upon  his  body.  Peter  gasped,  sprawled  and  had  the 
sensation  of  being  hauled  up  back  again  into  the  sky.  .  .  . 

It  was  all  right,  so  far.  He  was  now  swaying  down  earth- 
ward with  a  diminishing  velocity  beneath  an  open  parachute. 
He  was  floating  over  the  landscape  instead  of  falling 
straight  into  it. 

But  the  German  had  not  done  with  Peter  yet.  He  became 
visible  beneath  the  edge  of  Peter's  parachute,  circling  down- 
ward regardless  of  anti-aircraft  and  machine-guns.  "Pap, 
pap,  pap,  pap."  The  bullets  burst  and  banged  about  Peter. 

Something  kicked  Peter's  knee;  something  hit  his  neck; 
something  rapped  the  knuckles  of  his  wounded  hand;  the 
parachute  winced  and  went  sideways,  slashed  and  pierced. 
Peter  drifted  down  faster,  helpless,  his  angry  eyes  upon  his 
assailant,  who  vanished  again,  going  out  of  sight  as  he  rose 
up  above  the  edge  of  the  parachute. 

A  storm  of  pain  and  rage  broke  from  Peter. 

"Done  in!"  shouted  Peter.     "Oh!  my  leg!  my  leg! 

"I'm  shot  to  bits.     I'm  shot  to  bloody  bits!" 

The  tree  tops  were  near  at  hand.  The  parachute  had 
acquired  a  rhythmic  swing  and  was  falling  more  rapidly. 

"And  I've  still  got  to  land,"  wailed  Peter,  beginning  to 
cry  like  a  child. 

He  wanted  to  stop  just  a  moment,  just  for  one  little  mo- 
ment, before  the  ground  rushed  up  to  meet  him.  He  wanted 
time  to  think.  He  didn't  know  what  to  do  with  this  dan- 
gling leg.  It  became  a  monstrous,  painful  obstacle  to  land- 
ing. How. was  he  to  get  a  spring?  He  was  bleeding.  He 
was  dying.  It  was  cruel.  Cruel. 

Came  the  crash.  Hot  irons,  it  seemed,  assailed  his  leg  and 
his  shoulder  and  neck.  He  crumpled  up  on  the  ground  in  an 
agony,  and  the  parachute,  with  slow  and  elegant  gestures, 
folded  down  on  the  top  of  his  floundering  figure.  .  .  . 

The  gunners  who  ran  to  help  him  found  him,  enveloped  in 
silk,  bawling  and  weeping  like  a  child  of  four  in  a  passion 


JOAN  AND  PETER  GRADUATE      543 

of  rage  and  fear,  and  trying  repeatedly  to  stand  up  upon  a 
blood-streaked  leg  that  gave  way  as  repeatedly.  "Damn!" 
cursed  Peter  in  a  stifled  voice,  plunging  about  like  a  kitten 
in  a  sack.  "Damn  you  all!  I  tell  you  I  will  use  my  leg. 
I  will  have  my  leg.  If  I  bleed  to  death.  Oh!  Oh!  .  .  . 
You  fool — you  lying  old  humbug!  You !" 

And  then  he  gave  a  leap  upward  and  forward,  and 
fainted  and  fell,  and  lay  still,  with  his  head  and  body 
muffled  in  the  silk  folds  of  his  parachute. 


CHAPTER  THE  FOURTEENTH 
OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION 

§  1 

IT  was  the  third  of  April  in  1918,  the  Wednesday  after 
Easter,  and  the  war  had  now  lasted  three  years  and 
eight  months.  It  had  become  the  aching  habit  of  the 
whole  world.  Throughout  the  winter  it  had  been  for  the 
most  part  a  great  and  terrible  boredom,  but  now  a  phase  of 
acute  anxiety  was  beginning.  The  "Kaiser's  Battle"  was 
raging  in  France;  news  came  through  sparingly;  but  it  was 
known  that  General  Gough  had  lost  tens  of  thousands  of 
prisoners,  hundreds  of  guns,  and  vast  stores  of  ammunition 
and  railway  material.  It  was  rumoured  that  he  had  com- 
mitted suicide.  But  the  standards  of  Tory  England  differ 
from  those  of  Japan.  Through  ten  sanguinary  days,  in  a 
vaster  Inkerman,  the  common  men  of  Britain,  reinforced  by 
the  French,  had  fought  and  died  to  restore  the  imperilled 
line.  It  was  by  no  means  certain  yet  that  they  had  suc- 
ceeded. It  seemed  possible  that  the  French  and  British 
armies  would  be  broken  apart,  and  Amiens  and  Paris  lost. 
Oswald's  mind  was  still  dark  with  apprehension. 

The  particular  anxieties  of  this  crisis  accentuated  the 
general  worry  and  inconveniences  of  the  time,  and  deepened 
Oswald's  conviction  of  an  incredible  incompetence  in  both 
the  political  and  military  leadership  of  his  country.  In 
spite  of  every  reason  he  had  to  the  contrary,  he  had  con- 
tinued hitherto  to  hope  for  some  bright  dramatic  change  in 
the  course  of  events ;  he  had  experienced  a  continually  recur- 
ring disappointment  with  each  morning's  paper.  His  intel- 
ligence told  him  that  all  the  inefficiency,  the  confusion,  the 
cheap  and  bad  government  by  press  and  intrigue,  were  the 
necessary  and  inevitable  consequences  of  a  neglect  of  higher 
education  for  the  past  fifty  years ;  these  defects  were  now  in 

544 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  545 

the  nature  of  things,  almost  as  much  as  the  bleakness  of  an 
English  February  or  the  fogs  of  a  London  November,  but 
his  English  temperament  had  refused  hitherto  to  accept  the 
decision  of  his  intelligence.  Now  for  the  first  time  he  could 
see  the  possibility  of  an  ultimate  failure  in  the  war.  To  this 
low  level  of  achievement,  he  perceived,  a  steadfast  contempt 
for  thought  and  science  and  organization  had  brought  Brit- 
ain; at  this  low  level  Britain  had  now  to  struggle  through 
the  war,  blundering,  talking,  and  thinking  confusedly,  suf- 
fering enormously — albeit  so  sound  at  heart.  It  was  a 
humiliating  realization.  At  any  rate  she  could  still  hope  to 
struggle  through ;  the  hard-won  elementary  education  of  the 
common  people,  the  stout  heart  and  sense  of  the  common 
people,  saved  her  gentlefolk  from  the  fate  of  their  brother 
inefficients  in  Russia.  But  every  day  he  fretted  afresh  at 
the  costly  and  toilsome  continuance  of  an  effort  that  a  little 
more  courage  and  wisdom  in  high  places  on  the  allied  side, 
a  little  more  knowledge  and  clear  thinking,  might  have 
brought  to  an  entirely  satisfactory  close  in  1917. 

For  a  man  of  his  age,  wounded,  disappointed,  and  a 
chronic  invalid,  there  was  considerable  affliction  in  the  stead- 
ily increasing  hardships  of  the  Fourth  Year.  A  number  of 
petty  deprivations  at  which  a  healthy  man  might  have 
scoffed,  intensified  his  physical  discomfort.  There  had  been 
a  complete  restriction  of  his  supply  of  petrol,  the  automobile 
now  hung  in  its  shed  with  its  tyres  removed,  and  the  rail- 
way service  to  London  had  been  greatly  reduced.  He  could 
not  get  up  to  London  now  to  consult  books  or  vary  his  moods 
without  a  slow  and  crowded  and  fatiguing  journey;  he  was 
more  and  more  confined  to  Pelham  Ford.  He  had  been  used 
to  read  and  work  late  into  the  night,  but  now  his  home  was 
darkened  in  the  evening  and  very  cheerless;  there  was  no 
carbide  for  the  acetylene  installation,  and  a  need  for  economy 
in  paraffin.  For  a  time  he  had  been  out  of  coal,  and  unable 
to  get  much  wood  because  of  local  difficulties  about  cartage, 
and  for  some  weeks  he  had  had  to  sit  in  his  overcoat  and 
read  and  write  by  candlelight.  Now,  however,  that  distress 
had  been  relieved  by  the  belated  delivery  of  a  truckload  of 
coal.  And  another  matter  that  may  seem  trivial  in  history, 
was  by  no  means  trivial  in  relation  to  his  moods.  In  the 


546  JOAN  AND  PETER 

spring  of  1918  the  food  supply  of  Great  Britain  was  at  its 
lowest  point.  Lord  Rhondda  was  saving  the  situation  at  the 
eleventh  hour.  The  rationing  of  meat  had  affected  Oswald's 
health  disagreeably.  He  had  long  ago  acquired  the  habit  of 
living  upon  chops  and  cutlets  and  suchlike  concentrated 
nourishment,  and  he  found  it  difficult  to  adapt  himself  now 
to  the  bulky  insipidity  of  a  diet  that  was,  for  a  time,  almost 
entirely  vegetarian.  For  even  fish  travels  by  long  routes  to 
Hertfordshire  villages.  The  frequent  air  raids  of  that  win- 
ter were  also  an  added  nervous  irritation.  In  the  preceding 
years  of  the  war  there  had  been  occasional  Zeppelin  raids, 
the  Zeppelins  had  been  audible  at  Pelham  Ford  on  several 
occasions  and  once  Hertford  had  suffered  from  their  bombs ; 
but  those  expeditions  had  ended  at  last  in  a  series  of  dis- 
asters to  the  invaders,  and  they  had  never  involved  the  up- 
roar and  tension  of  the  Gotha  raids  that  began  in  the  latter 
half  of  1917.  These  latter  raids  had  to  be  met  by  an  im- 
mense barrage  of  anti-aircraft  guns  round  London,  a  bar- 
rage which  rattled  every  window  at  Pelham  Ford,  lit  the 
sky  with  star  shells,  and  continued  intermittently  sometimes 
for  four  or  five  hours.  Oswald  would  lie  awake  throughout 
that  thudding  conflict,  watching  the  distant  star  shells  and 
searchlights  through  the  black  tree  boughs  outside  his  open 
window,  and  meditating  drearily  upon  the  manifest  insanity 
of  mankind.  .  .  . 

He  was  now  walking  up  and  down  his  lawn,  waiting  until 
it  should  be  time  to  start  for  the  station  with  Joan  to  meet 
Peter. 

For  Peter,  convalescent  again  and  no  longer  fit  for  any 
form  of  active  service — he  was  lamed  now  as  well  as  winged — 
was  to  take  up  a  minor  administrative  post  next  week  at 
Adastral  House,  and  he  was  coming  down  for  a  few  days  at 
Pelham  Ford  before  carrying  his  wife  off  for  good  to  a 
little  service  flat  they  had  found  in  an  adapted  house  in  the 
Avenue  Road.  They  had  decided  not  to  live  at  The  Ingle- 
Nook,  although  Arthur  had  built  it  to  become  Peter's  home, 
but  to  continue  the  tenancy  of  Aunts  Phyllis  and  Phoebe. 
They  did  not  want  to  disturb  those  two  ladies,  whose  nervous 
systems,  by  no  means  stable  at  the  best  of  times,  were  now  in 
a  very  shaken  condition.  Aunt  Phyllis  was  kept  busy  re- 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  547 

straining  Aunt  Phoebe  from  inflicting  lengthy  but  obscure 
prophetic  messages  upon  most  of  the  prominent  people  of  the 
time.  To  these  daily  activities  Aunt  Phoebe  added  an  in- 
creasing habit  of  sleep-walking  that  broke  the  nightly  peace 
of  Aunt  Phyllis.  She  would  wander  through  the  moonlit 
living  rooms,  gesticulating  strangely,  and  uttering  such 
phrases  as  "Blood!  Blood!  Seas  of  blood!  The  multi- 
tudinous seas  incarnadine";  or  "Murder  most  foul!" 

She  had  a  fixed  idea  that  it  was  her  business  to  seek  out 
the  Kaiser  and  either  scold  him  or  kill  him — or  perhaps  do 
both.  She  held  that  it  was  the  duty  of  women  to  assassinate. 
Men  might  fight  battles,  it  was  their  stupid  way;  but  surely 
women  were  capable  of  directer  things.  If  some  woman 
were  to  kill  any  man  who  declared  war  directly  he  declared 
war,  there  would  be  a  speedy  end  to  war.  She  could  not, 
she  said,  understand  the  inactivity  of  German  wives  and 
mothers.  She  would  spend  hours  over  her  old  school  Ger- 
man grammar,  with  a  view  to  writing  an  "Open  Letter  to 
German  Womankind."  But  her  naturally  rich  and  very 
allusive  prose  was  ill  adapted  to  that  sort  of  translation. 

Many  over-sensitive  people  were  suffering  more  or  less  as 
Aunt  Phoebe  was  suffering — from  a  sense  of  cruelty,  wicked- 
ness, and  disaster  that  staggered  their  minds.  They  had 
lived  securely  in  a  secure  world;  they  could  not  readjust. 
Even  for  so  sane  a  mind  as  Oswald's,  hampered  as  it  was  by 
the  new  poison  his  recent  wound  had  brought  into  his  blood, 
readjustment  was  difficult.  He  suffered  greatly  from  in- 
somnia, and  from  a  haunting  apprehension  of  misfortunes. 
His  damaged  knee  would  give  him  bouts  of  acute  distress. 
Sometimes  it  would  seem  to  be  well  and  he  would  forget  it. 
Then  it  would  become  painfully  lame  by  day  and  a  neuralgic 
pain  at  night.  His  moods  seemed  always  exaggerated  now ; 
either  he  was  too  angry  or  too  sorrowful  or  too  hopeful. 
Sometimes  he  experienced  phases  of  blank  stupidity,  when 
his  mind  became  unaccountably  sluggish  and  clumsy.  .  .  . 

Joan  was  indoors  now  packing  up  a  boxful  of  books  that 
were  to  go  with  her  to  the  new  home. 

He  was  feeling  acutely — more  acutely  than  he  wanted  to 
feel — that  his  guardianship  was  at  an  end.  Joan,  who  had 
been  the  mistress  of  his  house,  and  the  voice  that  sang  in  it, 


548  JOAN  AND  PETER 

the  pretty  plant  that  grew  in  it,  was  going  now — to  re- 
turn, perhaps,  sometimes  as  a  visitor — but  never  more  to  be 
a  part  of  it ;  never  more  to  be  its  habitual  presence.  Peter, 
too,  was  severing  the  rope,  a  long  rope  it  had  seemed  at 
times  during  the  last  three  years,  that  had  tethered  him  to 
Pelham  Ford.  .  .  . 

Oswald  did  not  want  to  think  now  of  his  coming  loneli- 
ness. What  he  wanted  to  think  about  was  the  necessity  of 
rounding  off  their  relationship  properly,  of  ending  his  edu- 
cational task  with  some  sort  of  account  rendered.  He  felt 
he  owed  it  to  these  young  people  and  to  himself  to  tell  them 
of  his  aims  and  of  what  he  considered  the  whole  of  this  busi- 
ness of  education  amounted  to.  He  had  to  explain  what  had 
helped  and  what  had  prevented  him.  "A  Valediction,"  he 
said.  "A  Valediction."  But  he  could  not  plan  out  what 
he  had  to  say  that  morning.  He  could  not  arrange  his 
heads,  and  all  the  while  that  he  tried  to  fix  his  thoughts  upon 
these  topics,  he  was  filled  with  uncontrollable  self-pity  for 
the  solitude  ahead  of  him. 

He  was  ashamed  at  these  personal  distresses  that  he  could 
not  control.  He  disliked  himself  for  their  quality.  He  did 
not  like  to  think  he  was  thinking  the  thoughts  in  his  mind. 
He  walked  up  and  down  the  lawn  for  a  time  like  a  man  who 
is  being  pestered  by  uncongenial  solicitations. 

In  spite  of  his  intense  affection  for  both  of  them,  he  was 
feeling  a  real  jealousy  of  the  happiness  of  these  two  young 
lovers.  He  hated  the  thought  of  losing  Joan  much  more 
than  he  hated  the  loss  of  Peter.  Once  upon  a  time  he  had 
loved  Peter  far  more  than  Joan,  but  by  imperceptible  de- 
grees his  affection  had  turned  over  to  her.  In  these  war 
years  he  and  she  had  been  very  much  together.  For  a  time 
he  had  been — it  was  grotesque,  but  true — actually  in  love 
with  her.  He  had  let  himself  dream — .  It  was  preposterous 
to  think  of  it.  A  moonlight  night  had  made  his  brain 
swim.  ...  At  any  rate,  thank  Heaven !  she  had  never  had 
a  suspicion.  .  .  . 

She'd  come  now  as  a  visitor — perhaps  quite  often.  He 
wasn't  going  to  lose  his  Joan  altogether.  But  each  time  she 
would  come  changed,  rather  less  his  Joan  and  rather  more 
a  new  Joan — Peter's  Joan.  .  .  . 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  549 

Some  day  they'd  have  children,  these  two.  Joan  would 
sit  over  her  child  and  smile  down  at  it.  He  knew  exactly 
how  she  would  smile.  And  at  the  thought  of  that  smile  Joan 
gave  place  to  Dolly.  Out  of  the  past  there  jumped  upon 
him  the  memory  of  Peter  bubbling  in  a  cradle  on  the  sunny 
verandah  of  The  Ingle-Nook,  and  how  he  had  remarked  that 
the  very  sunshine  seemed  made  for  this  fortunate  young 
man. 

"It  was  made  for  him,"  Dolly  had  said,  with  that  faintly 
mischievous  smile  of  hers. 

How  far  off  that  seemed  now,  and  how  vivid  still!  He 
could  remember  Dolly's  shadow  on  the  roughcast  wall,  and 
the  very  things  he  had  said  in  reply.  He  had  talked  like  a 
fool  about  the  wonderful  future  of  Peter — and  of  the  world. 
How  long  was  that  ago?  Five-and-twenty  years?  (Yes, 
Peter  would  be  five-and-twenty  in  June.)  How  safe  and 
secure  the  European  world  had  seemed  then!  It  seemed  to 
be  loitering,  lazily  and  basely  indeed,  but  certainly,  towards 
a  sort  of  materialist's  millennium.  And  what  a  vast  sham  its 
security  had  been!  He  had  called  Peter  the  "Heir  of  the 
Ages."  And  the  Heritage  of  the  Ages  had  been  preparing 
even  then  to  take  Peter  away  from  the  work  he  had  chosen 
and  from  all  the  sunshine  and  leisure  of  his  life  and  to  splin- 
ter his  shoulder-blade,  smash  his  wrist,  snap  his  leg-bones 
with  machine-gun  bullets,  and  fling  him  aside,  a  hobbling, 
stiff,  broken  young  man  to  limp  through  the  rest  of  life.  .  .  . 


That  was  what  his  mind  had  to  lay  hold  of,  that  was  what 
he  had  to  talk  about,  this  process  that  had  held  out  such  fair 
hopes  for  Peter  and  had  in  the  end  crippled  him  and  come 
near  to  killing  him  and  wasting  him  altogether.  He  had  to 
talk  of  that,  of  an  enormous  collapse  and  breach  of  faith 
with  the  young.  The  world  which  had  seemed  to  be  the 
glowing  promise  of  an  unprecedented  education  and  upbring- 
ing for  Peter  and  his  generation,  the  world  that  had  been, 
so  to  speak,  joint  guardian  with  himself,  had  defaulted. 
This  war  was  an  outrage  by  the  senior  things  in  the  world 


550  JOAN  AND  PETER 

upon  all  the  hope  of  the  future;  it  was  the  parent  sending 
his  sons  through  the  fires  to  Moloch,  it  was  the  guardian 
gone  mad,  it  was  the  lapse  of  all  educational  responsibility. 

He  had  to  keep  his  grasp  upon  that  idea.  By  holding 
to  that  he  could  get  away  from  his  morbidly  intense  wish  to 
be  personal  and  intimate  with  these  two.  He  loved  them  and 
they  loved  him,  but  what  he  wanted  to  say  was  something 
quite  beyond  that. 

What  he  had  to  talk  about  was  Education,  and  Education 
alone.  He  had  to  point  out  to  them  that  their  own  educa- 
tion had  been  truncated,  was  rough  ended  and  partial.  He 
had  to  explain  why  that  was  so.  And  he  had  to  show  that 
all  this  vast  disaster  to  the  world  was  no  more  and  no  less 
than  an  educational  failure.  The  churches  and  teachers  and 
political  forms  had  been  insufficient  and  wrong;  they  had 
failed  to  establish  ideas  strong  and  complete  enough  and 
right  enough  to  hold  the  wills  of  men.  Necessarily  he  had 
to  make  a  dissertation  upon  the  war.  To  talk  of  life  now  was 
to  talk  of  the  war.  The  war  now  was  human  life.  It  had 
eaten  up  all  free  and  independent  living. 

The  war  was  an  educational  breakdown,  that  was  his 
point;  and  in  education  lay  whatever  hope  there  was  for 
mankind.  He  had  to  say  that  to  them,  and  he  had  to  point 
out  how  that  idea  must  determine  the  form  of  their  lives. 
He  had  to  show  the  political  and  social  and  moral  conclu- 
sions involved  in  it.  And  he  had  to  say  what  he  wanted  to 
say  in  a  large  manner.  He  had  to  keep  his  temper  while 
he  said  it. 

Oswald,  limping  slowly  up  and  down  his  lawn  in  the  April 
sunshine,  with  a  gnawing  pain  at  his  knee,  had  to  underline, 
as  it  were,  that  last  proviso  in  his  thoughts.  That  was  the 
extreme  difficulty  of  these  urgent  and  tragic  times.  The  world 
was  in  a  phase  of  intense,  but  swift,  tumultuous,  and  dis- 
tracting tragedy.  The  millions  were  not  suffering  and  dying 
in  stateliness  and  splendour  but  in  a  vast  uproar,  amidst 
mud,  confusion,  bickering,  and  incoherence  indescribable. 
While  it  was  manifest  that  only  great  thinking,  only  very 
clear  and  deliberate  thinking,  could  give  even  the  forms  of 
action  that  would  arrest  the  conflagration,  it  was  nevertheless 
almost  impossible  for  any  one  anywhere  to  think  clearly  and 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  551 

deliberately,  so  universal  and  various  were  the  compulsions, 
confusions,  and  distresses  of  the  time.  And  even  the  effect 
to  see  and  state  the  issue  largely,  fevered  Oswald's  brain. 
He  grew  angry  with  the  multitudinous  things  that  robbed 
him  of  his  serenity. 

"Education/'  he  said,  as  if  he  called  for  help;  "educa- 
tion." 

And  then,  collapsing  into  wrath:  "A  land  of  unedu- 
cated blockheads!" 

No!  It  was  not  one  of  his  good  mornings.  In  a  little 
while  his  steps  had  quickened  and  his  face  had  flushed. 
His  hands  clenched  in  his  pockets.  "A  universal  dulness 
of  mind,"  he  whispered.  "Obstinacy.  .  .  .  Inadaptability. 
.  .  .  Unintelligent  opposition." 

Broad  generalizations  slipped  out  of  his  mind.  He  began 
to  turn  over  one  disastrous  instance  after  another  of  the 
shortness  of  mental  range,  the  unimaginative  stupidity,  the 
baseness  and  tortuousness  of  method,  the  dull  suspicions, 
class  jealousies,  and  foolish  conceits  that  had  crippled  Brit- 
ain through  three  and  a  half  bitter  years.  With  a  vast 
fleet,  with  enormous  armies,  with  limitless  wealth,  with  the 
loyal  enthusiasm  behind  them  of  a  united  people  and  with 
great  allies,  British  admirals  and  generals  had  never  once 
achieved  any  great  or  brilliant  success,  British  statesmen 
had  never  once  grasped  and  held  the  fluctuating  situation. 
One  huge  disappointment,  had  followed  another;  now  at 
Gallipoli,  now  at  Kut,  now  in  the  air  and  now  beneath  the 
seas,  the  British  had  seen  their  strength  ill  applied  and 
their  fair  hopes  of  victory  waste  away.  No  Nelson  had 
arisen  to  save  the  country,  no  Wellington;  no  Nelson  nor 
Wellington  could  have  arisen;  the  country  had  not  even 
found  an  alternative  to  Mr.  Lloyd  George.  In  military  and 
naval  as  in  social  and  political  affairs  the  Anglican  ideal  had 
been — to  blockade.  On  sea  and  land,  as  in  Ireland,  as  in 
India,  Anglicanism  was  not  leading  but  obstruction. 
Throughout  1917  the  Allied  armies  upon  the  Western  front 
had  predominated  over  the  German  as  greatly  as  the  British 
fleet  had  predominated  at  sea,  and  the  result  on  either  ele- 
ment had  been  stagnation.  The  cavalry  coterie  who  ruled 
upon  land  had  demonstrated  triumphantly  their  incapacity 


552  JOAN  AND  PETER 

to  seize  even  so  great  an  opportunity  as  the  surprise  of  the 
tanks  afforded  them ;  the  Admiralty  had  left  the  Baltic  to 
the  Germans  until,  after  the  loss  of  Riga,  poor  Kerensky's 
staggering  government  had  collapsed.  British  diplomacy 
had  completed  what  British  naval  quiescence  began ;  in  Rus- 
sia as  in  Greece  it  had  existed  only  to  blunder ;  never  had  a 
just  cause  been  so  mishandled;  and  before  the  end  of  1917 
the  Russian  debacle  had  been  achieved  and  the  German 
armies,  reinforced  by  the  troops  the  Russian  failure  had  re- 
leased, began  to  concentrate  for  this  last  great  effort  that 
was  now  in  progress  in  the  west.  Like  many  another  anx- 
ious and  distressed  Englishman  during  those  darker  days  of 
the  German  spring  offensive  in  1918,  Oswald  went  about 
clinging  to  one  comfort :  ' '  Our  men  are  tough  stuff.  Our 
men  at  any  rate  will  stick  it." 

In  Oswald's  mind  there  rankled  a  number  of  special  cases 
which  he  called  his  "sores."  To  think  of  them  made  him 
angry  and  desperate,  and  yet  he  could  scarcely  ever  think  of 
education  without  reviving  the  irritation  of  these  particular 
instances.  They  were  his  foreground ;  they  blocked  his 
vistas,  and  got  between  him  and  the  general  prospect  of  the 
world.  For  instance,  there  had  been  a  failure  to  supply 
mosquito  curtains  in  the  East  African  hospitals,  and  a  num- 
ber of  slightly  wounded  men  had  contracted  fever  and  died. 
This  fact  had  linked  on  to  the  rejection  of  the  services  he 
had  offered  at  the  outset  of  the  war,  and  became  a  festering 
centre  in  his  memory.  Those  mosquito  curtains  blew  into 
every  discussion.  Moreover  there  had  been,  he  believed, 
much  delay  and  inefficiency  in  the  use  of  African  native 
labour  in  France,  and  a  lack  of  proper  organization  for  the 
special  needs  of  the  sick  and  injured  among  these  tropic-bred 
men.  And  a  shipload  had  been  sunk  in  a  collision  off  the 
Isle  of  Wight.  He  had  got  an  irrational  persuasion  into  his 
head  that  this  collision  could  have  been  prevented.  After 
his  wound  had  driven  him  back  to  Pelham  Ford  he  would 
limp  about  the  garden  thinking  of  his  "boys"  shivering  in 
the  wet  of  a  French  winter  and  dying  on  straw  in  cold  cattle 
trucks,  or  struggling  and  drowning  in  the  grey  channel 
water,  and  he  would  fret  and  swear.  "Plugger  mugger," 
he  would  say,  "hugger  mugger!  No  care.  No  foresight. 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  553 

No  proper  grasp  of  the  problem.  And  so  death  and  torment 
for  the  men." 

While  still  so  painful  and  feverish  he  had  developed  a 
new  distress  for  himself  by  taking  up  the  advocacy  of  certain 
novelties  and  devices  that  he  became  more  and  more  con- 
vinced were  of  vital  importance  upon  the  Western  front. 
He  entangled  himself  in  correspondence,  interviews,  com- 
mittees, and  complicated  quarrels  in  connection  with  these 
ideas.  .  .  .  He  would  prowl  about  his  garden,  a  baffled  man, 
trying  to  invent  some  way  of  breaking  through  the  system 
of  entanglements  that  held  back  British  inventiveness  from 
the  service  of  Great  Britain.  More  and  more  clearly  did  his 
reason  assure  him  that  no  sudden  blow  can  set  aside  the 
deep-rooted  traditions,  the  careless,  aimless  education  of  a 
negligent  century,  but  none  the  less  he  raged  at  individuals, 
at  ministries,  at  coteries  and  classes. 

His  peculiar  objection  to  the  heads  of  the  regular  army, 
for  example,  was  unjust,  for  much  the  same  unimagina- 
tive resistance  was  evident  in  every  branch  of  the  public 
activities  of  Great  Britain.  Already  in  1915  the  very  half- 
penny journalists  were  pointing  out  the  necessity  of  a  great 
air  offensive  for  the  allies,  were  showing  that  in  the  matter 
of  the  possible  supply  of  good  air  fighters  the  Germans  were 
altogether  inferior  to  their  antagonists  and  that  consequently 
they  would  be  more  and  more  at  a  disadvantage  in  the  air 
as  the  air  warfare  was  pressed.  But  the  British  mind  was 
trained,  so  far  that  is  as  one  can  speak  of  it  as  being  trained 
at  all,  to  dread  "over-pressure."  The  western  allies  having 
won  a  certain  ascendancy  in  the  air  in  1916  became  so  self- 
satisfied  that  the  Germans,  in  spite  of  their  disadvantages, 
were  able  to  recover  a  kind  of  equality  in  1917,  and  in  the 
spring  of  1918  the  British,  with  their  leeway  recovered, 
were  going  easily  in  mattters  aerial,  and  the  opinion  that  a 
great  air  offensive  might  yet  end  the  war  was  regarded  as  the 
sign  of  a  froward  and  revolutionary  spirit. 

The  sea  war  bad  a  parallel  history.  Long  before  1914  Dr. 
Conan  Doyle  had  written  a  story  to  illustrate  the  dangers  of 
an  unrestricted  submarine  attack,  but  no  precaution  what- 
ever against  such  a  possibility  seemed  to  have  been  under- 
taken by  the  British  Admiralty  before  the  war  at  all ;  Great 


554  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Britain  was  practically  destitute  of  sea  mines  in  the  October 
of  1914,  and  even  in  the  spring  of  1918,  after  more  than  a 
year  and  a  half  of  hostile  submarine  activity,  after  the  Brit- 
ish had  lost  millions  of  tons  of  shipping,  after  the  people 
were  on  short  commons  and  becoming  very  anxious  about 
rations,  the  really  very  narrow  channel  of  the  North  Sea — 
rarely  is  it  more  than  three  hundred  miles  wide — which  was 
the  only  way  out  the  Germans  possessed,  was  still  unfenced 
against  the  coming  and  going  of  these  most  vulnerable  pests. 

It  is  hard  not  to  blame  individual  men  and  groups  when 
the  affairs  of  a  nation  go  badly.  It  is  so  much  easier  to 
change  men  than  systems.  The  former  satisfies  every  in- 
stinct in  the  fierce,  suspicious  hearts  of  men,  the  latter  de- 
mands the  bleakest  of  intellectual  efforts.  The  former  jus- 
tifies the  healthy,  wholesome  relief  of  rioting;  the  latter 
necessitates  self-control.  The  country  was  at  sixes  and 
sevens  because  its  education  by  school  and  college,  by  book 
and  speech  and  newspaper,  was  confused  and  superficial  and 
incomplete,  and  its  education  was  confused  and  superficial 
and  incomplete  because  its  institutions  were  a  patched-up  sys- 
tem of  traditions,  compromises,  and  interests,  devoid  of  any 
clear  and  single  guiding  idea  of  a  national  purpose.  The 
only  wrongs  that  really  matter  to  mankind  are  the  undra- 
matic  general  wrongs;  but  the  only  wrongs  that  appeal  to 
the  uneducated  imagination  are  individual  wrongs.  It  is  so 
much  more  congenial  to  the  ape  in  us  to  say  that  if  Mr.  As- 
quith  hadn't  been  lazy  or  Mr.  Lloyd  George  disingenu- 
ous  !  Then  out  with  the  halter — and  don 't  bother  about 

yourself.  As  though  the  worst  of  individuals  can  be  any- 
thing more  than  the  indicating  pustule  of  a  systemic  malaise. 
For  his  own  part  Oswald  was  always  reviling  schoolmasters, 
as  though  they,  alone  among  men,  had  the  power  to  rise 
triumphant  over  all  their  circumstances — and  wouldn't. 
He  had  long  since  forgotten  Mr.  Mackinder's  apology. 

He  limped  and  fretted  to  and  fro  across  the  lawn  in  his 
struggle  to  get  out  of  his  jungle  of  wrathful  thoughts,  about 
drowned  negroes  and  rejected  inventions,  and  about  the 
Baltic  failure  and  about  Gough  of  the  Curragh  and  St.  Quen- 
tin,  to  general  and  permanent  things. 

"Education,"  he  said  aloud,  struggling  against  his  obses- 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  555 

sions.  ' '  Education !  I  have  to  tell  them  what  it  ought  to 
be,  how  it  is  more  or  less  the  task  of  every  man,  how  it  can 
unify  the  world,  how  it  can  save  mankind.  ..." 

And  then  after  a  little  pause,  with  an  apparent  complete 
irrelevance,  "Damn  Aunt  Charlotte!" 


§4 

Nowadays  quite  little  things  would  suddenly  assume  a 
tremendous  and  devastating  importance  to  Oswald.  In  his 
pocket,  not  folded  but  crumpled  up,  was  an  insulting  letter 
from  Lady  Charlotte  Sydeuham,  and  the  thought  of  it  was 
rankling  bitterly  in  his  mind. 

The  days  were  long  past  when  he  could  think  of  the  old 
lady  as  of  something  antediluvian  in  quality,  a  queer  un- 
gainly megatherium  floundering  about  in  a  new  age  from 
which  her  kind  would  presently  vanish  altogether.  He  was 
beginning  to  doubt  more  and  more  about  her  imminent  dis- 
appearance. She  had  greater  powers  of  survival  than  he 
had  supposed ;  he  was  beginning  to  think  that  she  might  out- 
live him;  there  was  much  more  of  her  in  England  than  he 
had  ever  suspected.  All  through  the  war  she,  or  a  voice 
indistinguishable  from  hers,  had  bawled  unchastened  in  the 
Morning  Post;  on  many  occasions  he  had  seemed  to  see  her 
hard  blue  eye  and  bristling  whisker  glaring  at  him  through 
a  kind  of  translucency  in  the  sheets  of  The  Times;  once  or 
twice  in  France  he  had  recognized  her,  or  something  very 
like  her,  in  red  tabs  and  gilt  lace,  at  G.H.Q.  These  were 
sick  fancies  no  doubt ;  mere  fantastic  intimations  of  the  stout 
resistances  the  Anglican  culture  could  still  offer  before  it 
loosened  its  cramping  grip  upon  the  future  of  England 
and  the  world,  evidence  rather  of  his  own  hypersensitized 
condition  than  of  any  perennial  quality  in  her. 

The  old  lady  had  played  a  valiant  part  in  the  early 
stages  of  the  war.  She  had  interested  herself  in  the  perse- 
cution of  all  Germans  not  related  to  royalty,  who  chanced  to 
be  in  the  country;  and  had  even  employed  private  detec- 
tives in  one  or  two  cases  that  had  come  under  her  notice. 
She  had  been  forced  most  unjustly  to  defend  a  libel  case 


556  JOAN  AND  PETER 

brought  by  a  butcher  named  Sterne,  whom  she  had  de- 
nounced as  of  German  origin  and  a  probable  poisoner  of  the 
community,  in  the  very  laudable  belief  that  his  name  was 
spelt  Stern.  She  felt  that  his  indubitable  British  ancestry 
and  honesty  only  enhanced  the  deception  and  made  the  whole 
thing  more  alarming,  but  the  jury,  being  no  doubt  tainted 
with  pacifism,  thought,  or  pretended  to  think,  otherwise. 
She  had  had  a  reconciliation  with  her  old  antagonists  the 
Pankhurst  section  of  the  suffragettes,  and  she  had  paid 
twenty  annual  subscriptions  to  their  loyal  and  outspoken 
publication  Britannia,  directing  twelve  copies  to  be  sent  to 
suitable  recipients — Oswald  was  one  of  the  favoured  ones — 
and  herself  receiving  and  blue-pencilling  the  remaining  eight 
before  despatching  them  to  such  public  characters  as  she 
believed  would  be  most  beneficially  cowed  or  instructed  by 
the  articles  she  had  marked.  She  also  subscribed  liberally  to 
the  British  Empire  Union,  an  organization  so  patriotic  that 
it  extended  its  hostility  to  Russians,  Americans,  Irishmen, 
neutrals,  President  Wilson,  the  League  of  Nations,  and  sim- 
ilar infringements  of  the  importance  and  dignity  of  Lady 
Charlotte  and  her  kind.  She  remained  at  Chastlands,  where 
she  had  laid  in  an  ample  store  of  provisions  quite  early  in 
the  war — two  sacks  of  mouldy  flour  and  a  side  of  bacon  in 
an  advanced  state  of  decomposition  had  been  buried  at  night 
by  Cashel — all  through  the  Zeppelin  raids;  and  she  played 
a  prominent  rather  than  a  pacifying  part  in  the  Red  Cross 
politics  of  that  part  of  Surrey.  She  induced  several  rich 
Jewesses  of  Swiss,  Dutch,  German  or  Austrian  origin  to  re- 
lieve the  movement  of  their  names  and,  what  was  still  better, 
of  the  frequently  quite  offensively  large  subscriptions  with 
which  they  overshadowed  those  who  had  the  right  to  lead  in 
such  matters.  She  lectured  also  in  the  National  Economy 
campaign  on  several  occasions — for  like  most  thoughtful 
women  of  her  class  and  type,  she  was  deeply  shocked  by  the 
stories  she  had  heard  of  extravagance  among  our  over-paid 
munition  workers.  After  a  time  the  extraordinary  mean- 
ness of  the  authorities  in  restricting  her  petrol  obliged  her 
in  self-respect  to  throw  up  this  branch  of  her  public  work. 
She  was  in  London  during  one  of  the  early  Gotha  raids,  but 
she  conceived  such  a  disgust  at  the  cowardice  of  the  lower 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  557 

classes  on  this  occasion  that  she  left  town  the  next  day  and 
would  not  return  thither. 

The  increasing  scarcity  of  petrol  and  the  onset  of  food 
rationing,  which  threatened  to  spread  all  over  England, 
drove  her  to  Ulster — in  spite  of  the  submarine  danger  that 
might  have  deterred  a  less  stout-hearted  woman.  She  took 
a  small  furnished  house  in  a  congenial  district,  and  found 
herself  one  of  a  little  circle  of  ultra-patriotic  refugees,  driven 
like  herself  from  England  by  un-English  restrictions  upon 
the  nourishment  of  the  upper  classes  and  the  spread  of  the 
pacifist  tendencies  of  Lord  Lansdowne.  "If  the  cowards 
must  make  peace,"  said  Lady  Charlotte,  "at  least  give  me 
leave  to  be  out  of  it." 

Considering  everything,  Ulster  was  at  that  time  as  com- 
fortably and  honourably  out  of  the  war  as  any  part  of  the 
world,  and  all  that  seemed  needed  to  keep  it  safely  out  to  the 
end  was  a  little  tactful  firmness  in  the  Dublin  Convention. 
There  was  plenty  of  everything  in  the  loyal  province  at 
that  time — men,  meat,  butter,  Dublin  stout,  and  self-right- 
eousness; and  Lady  Charlotte  expanded  again  like  a  flower 
in  the  sun.  She  reverted  to  driving  in  a  carriage;  it  was 
nice  to  sit  once  more  behind  a  stout  able-bodied  coachman 
with  a  cockade,  with  a  perfect  excuse  for  neutrality,  and 
she  still  did  her  best  for  old  England  from  eleven  to  one 
and  often  from  five  to  six  by  writing  letters  and  dabbling 
in  organization.  Oswald  she  kept  in  mind  continually.  Al- 
most daily  he  would  get  newspaper  cuttings  from  her  detail- 
ing Sinn  Fein  outrages,  or  blue-marked  leading  articles  agi- 
tating for  a  larger  share  of  the  munition  industries  for 
Belfast,  or  good  hot  stuff,  deeply  underlined,  from  the 
speeches  of  Sir  Edward  Carson.  One  dastardly  Sinn 
Feiner,  Oswald  learnt,  had  even  starved  himself  to  death  in 
gaol,  a  most  unnatural  offence  to  Lady  Charlotte.  She 
warmed  up  tremendously  over  the  insidious  attempts  of  the 
Prime  Minister  and  a  section  of  the  press  to  get  all  the  armies 
in  France  and  Italy  under  one  supreme  generalissimo  and 
end  the  dislocated  muddling  that  had  so  long  prolonged  the 
war.  It  was  a  change  that  might  have  involved  the  replace- 
ment of  regular  generals  by  competent  ones,  and  it  imper- 
illed everything  that  was  most  dear  to  the  old  lady's  heart. 


558  JOAN  AND  PETER 

It  was  "an  insult  to  the  King's  uniform,"  she  wrote.  "A 
revolution.  1  knew  that  this  sort  of  thing  would  begin  if 
we  let  those  Americans  come  in.  We  ought  not  to  have  let 
them  come  in.  What  good  are  they  to  us?  What  can  they 
know  of  war?  A  crowd  of  ignorant  republican  renegades! 
British  generals  to  be  criticized  and  their  prospects  injured 
by  French  Roman  Catholics  and  Atheists  and  chewing,  ex- 
pectorating Yankees  and  every  sort  of  low  foreigner.  What 
is  the  world  coming  to?  Sir  Douglas  Haig  has  been  ex- 
actly where  he  is  for  two  years.  Surely  he  knows  the  ground 
better  than  any  one  else  can  possibly  do." 

Once  the  theme  of  Lady  Charlotte  got  loose  in  Oswald's 
poor  old  brain,  it  began  a  special  worry  of  its  own.  He 
found  his  mind  struggling  with  assertions  and  arguments. 
As  this  involved  trying  to  remember  exactly  what  she  had 
said  in  this  letter  of  hers,  and  as  it  was  in  his  pocket,  he 
presently  chose  the  lesser  of  two  evils  and  took  it  out  to  read 
over : — 

"1  suppose  you  have  read  in  the  papers  what  is  happening 
in  Clare.  The  people  are  ploughing  up  grass-land.  It  is 
as  bad  as  that  man  Prothero.  They  raid  gentlemen's  houses 
to  seize  arms;  they  resist  the  police.  That  man  Devil-era — 
so  1  must  call  him — speaks  openly  of  a  republic.  Devil-era 
and  Devil-in;  is  it  a  coincidence  merely?  All  this  comes  of 
our  illtimed  leniency  after  the  Dublin  rebellion.  When  will 
England  learn  the  lesson  Cromwell  taught  her?  He  was  a 
wicked  man,  he  made  one  great  mistake  for  which  he  is  no 
doubt  answering  to  his  Maker  throughout  all  eternity,  but 
he  certainly  did  know  how  to  manage  these  Irish.  If  he 
could  come  ~back  now  he  would  be  on  our  side.  He  would 
have  had  his  lesson.  Your  Bolshevik  friends  go  on  murder- 
ing and  cutting  throats,  I  see,  like  true  Republicans.  Hap- 
pily the  White  Guards  seem  getting  the  upper  hand  in  Fin- 
land. In  the  end  I  suppose  we  shall  be  driven  to  a  peace 
with  the  Huns  as  the  worst  of  two  evils.  If  we  do,  it  will 
only  be  your  Bolsheviks  and  pacifists  and  strikers  and  Bolos 
who  will  be  to  blame. 

"The  whining  and  cowardice  of  the  East  Enders  disgusts 
me  more  and  more.  You  read,  I  suppose,  the  account  of  the 
disgraceful  panic  during  the  air  raid  the  other  day  in  the 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  559 

East  End,  due  entirely  to  foreigners  of  military  age,  mostly, 
no  doubt,  your  Russian  Bolsheviks.  I  am  well  away  from 
such  a  rabble.  I  suffer  from  rheumatism  here.  I  know  it 
is  rheumatism;  what  you  say  about  gout  is  nonsense.  In 
spite  of  its  loyalty  Ulster  is  damp.  1  pine  more  and  more 
for  the  sun  and  warmth  of  Italy.  Unwin  must  needs  make 
herself  very  tiresome  and  peevish  nowadays.  These  are  not 
cheerful  times  for  me.  But  one  must  do  one's  bit  for  one's 
country,  I  suppose,  unworthy  though  it  be. 

"So  Mr.  Peter  is  back  in  England  again  wounded  after 
his  flying  about  in  the  air.  I  suppose  he  is  tasting  the  de- 
lights of  matrimony,  such  as  they  are!  What  an  affair! 
Something  told  me  long  ago  that  it  would  happen.  I  tried 
to  separate  them.  My  instincts  warned  me,  and  my  instincts 
were  right.  Breed  is  breed,  and  the  servant  strain  came  out 
in  her.  You  can't  say  I  didn't  warn  you.  Why  you  let 
them  marry  I  cannot  imagine!!!  I  am  sure  the  young  lady 
could  have  dispensed  with  that  ceremony!!!!  I  still  think 
at  times  of  that  queer  scene  I  passed  on  the  road  when  I 
came  to  Pelham  Ford  that  Christmas.  A  second  string, — 
no  doubt  of  it.  But  Peter  was  her  great  chance,  of  course, 
thanks  to  your  folly.  Well,  let  us  hope  that  in  the  modern 
way  they  won't  have  any  children,  for  nothing  is  more  cer- 
tain than  that  these  inter-breeding  marriages  are  most  harm- 
ful, and  whether  we  like  it  or  not  you  have  to  remember 
they  are  first  cousins,  if  not  in  the  sight  of  the  law  at  any 
rate  in  the  sight  of  God,  which  is  what  matters  in  this  re- 
spect. Mr.  Grimes,  who  has  studied  these  things  in  his 
leisure  time,  tells  me  that  there  is  a  very  great  probability 
indeed  that  any  child  will  be  blind  or  malformed  or  con- 
sumptive, let  us  hope  the  latter,  if  not  actually  still-born, 
which,  of  course,  would  be  the  best  thing  that  could  possibly 
happen.  .  .  ." 

§  5 

At  this  point  Oswald  became  aware  of  Joan  coming  out  of 
the  house  towards  him. 

He  looked  at  his  watch.  "Much  too  early  yet,  Joan,"  he 
said. 

"Yes,  but  I  want  to  be  meeting  him,"  said  Mrs.  Joan.  .  .  . 


560  JOAN  AND  PETER 

So  they  walked  down  to  the  station  and  waited  for  a  long 
time  on  the  platform.  And  Joan  said  very  little  to  Oswald 
because  she  was  musing  pleasantly. 

When  the  train  came  in  neither  Joan  nor  Peter  took  much 
notice  of  Oswald  after  the  first  greeting.  I  do  not  see  what 
else  he  could  have  expected ;  they  were  deeply  in  love  and 
they  had  been  apart  for  a  couple  of  weeks,  they  were  ex- 
cited by  each  other  and  engrossed  in  each  other.  Oswald 
walked  beside  them  up  the  road — apart.  "I've  got  some 
work,"  he  said  abruptly  in  the  hall.  "See  you  at  lunch," 
and  went  into  his  study  and  shut  the  door  upon  them,  ab- 
surdly disappointed. 


§  6 

Peter  came  on  "Wednesday.  It  was  not  until  Friday  that 
Oswald  found  an  opportunity  to  deliver  his  valediction. 
But  he  had  rehearsed  it,  or  rather  he  had  been  rehearsing 
experimental  fragments  of  it  for  most  of  the  night  before. 
On  Thursday  night  the  cloudy  malaise  of  his  mind  broke 
and  cleared.  Things  fell  into  their  proper  places  in  his 
thoughts,  and  he  could  feel  that  his  ideas  were  no  longer 
distorted  and  confused.  The  valediction  appeared,  an  or- 
dered discourse.  If  only  he  could  hold  out  through  a  long 
talk  he  felt  he  would  be  able  to  make  himself  plain  to 
them.  .  .  . 

He  lay  in  the  darkness  putting  together  phrase  after 
phrase,  sentence  after  sentence,  developing  a  long  and  elabo- 
rate argument,  dipping  down  into  parentheses,  throwing  off 
footnotes,  resuming  his  text.  For  the  most  part  Joan  and 
Peter  remained  silent  hearers  of  this  discourse ;  now  his  ratio- 
cination glowed  so  brightly  that  they  were  almost  forgotten, 
now  they  came  into  the  discussion,  they  assisted,  they  said 
helpful  and  understanding  things,  they  raised  simple  and  ob- 
vious objections  that  were  beautifully  overcome. 

"What  is  education  up  to?"  he  would  begin.  "What  is 
education  ? ' ' 

Then  came  a  sentence  that  he  repeated  in  the  stillness  of 
his  mind  quite  a  number  of  times.  "Consider  this  beast 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  561 

we  are,  this  thing  man!"    He  did  not  reckon  with  Peter's 
tendency  to  prompt  replies. 

He  would  begin  in  the  broadest,  most  elementary  way. 
"Consider  this  beast  we  are,  this  thing  man!"  so  he  framed 
his  opening:  "a  creature  restlessly  experimental,  mischiev- 
ous and  destructive,  as  sexual  as  a  monkey,  and  with  no 
really  strong  social  instincts,  no  such  tolerance  of  his  fellows 
as  a  deer  has,  no  such  instinctive  self-devotion  as  you  find  in 
a  bee  or  an  ant.  A  solitary  animal,  a  selfish  animal.  And 
yet  this  creature  has  now  made  for  itself  such  conditions  that 
it  must  be  social.  Must  be.  Or  destroy  itself.  Continually 
it  invents  fresh  means  by  which  man  may  get  at  man  to 
injure  him  or  help  him.  That  is  one  view  of  the  creature, 
Peter,  from  your  biological  end."  Here  Peter  was  to  nod, 
and  remain  attentively  awaiting  the  next  development. 
"And  at  the  same  time,  there  grows  upon  us  all  a  sense  of  a 
common  being  and  a  common  interest.  Biologically  sepa- 
rate, we  unify  spiritualty.  More  and  more  do  men  feel,  'I 
am  not  for  myself!  There  is  something  in  me — that  be- 
longs to  a  greater  being  than  myself — of  which  I  am  a  part.' 
...  I  won 't  philosophize.  I  won 't  say  which  may  be  in  the 
nature  of  cause  and  which  of  effect  here.  You  can  put  what 
I  have  said  in  a  dozen  different  ways.  We  may  say,  'The 
individual  must  live  in  the  species  and  find  his  happiness 
there' — that  is — Biologese.  Our  language,  Peter.  Or  we 
can  quote,  'I  am  the  True  Vine  and  ye  are  the  Branches.'  ' 
Oswald's  mind  rested  on  that  for  a  time.  "That  is  not  our 
language,  Peter,  but  it  is  the  same  idea.  Essentially  it  is 
the  same  idea.  Or  we  can  talk  of  the  'One  and  the  Many.' 
We  can  say  we  all  live  in  the  mercy  of  Allah,  or  if  you  are  a 
liberal  Jew  that  we  are  all  a  part  of  Israel.  It  seems  to  me 
that  all  these  formulae  are  so  much  spluttering  and  variation 
over  one  idea.  Doesn't  it  to  you?  Men  can  quarrel  mor- 
tally even  upon  the  question  of  how  they  shall  say  'Brother- 
hood.' ..."  Here  for  a  time  Oswald's  mind  paused. 

He  embarked  upon  a  great  and  wonderful  parenthesis  upon 
religious  intolerance  in  which  at  last  he  lost  himself  com- 
pletely. 

"I  don't  see  that  men  need  fall  out  about  religion,"  was 
his  main  proposition. 


562  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"There  was  a  time  when  I  was  against  all  religions.  I 
denounced  priestcraft  and  superstition  and  so  on.  ...  That 
is  past.  That  is  past.  I  want  peace  in  the  world.  .  .  . 
Men's  minds  differ  more  about  initial  things  than  they  do 
about  final  things.  Some  men  think  in  images,  others  in 
words  and  abstract  ideas — but  yet  the  two  sorts  can  think 
out  the  same  practical  conclusions.  A  lot  of  these  chapels 
and  cbjurches  only  mean  a  difference  in  language.  .  .  . 
Difference  in  dialect.  .  .  .  Often  they  don't  mean  the  same 
things,  those  religious  people,  by  the  same  words,  but  often 
contrariwise  they  mean  the  same  things  by  quite  different 
words.  The  deaf  man  says  the  dawn  is  bright  and  red,  and 
the  blind  man  says  it  is  a  sound  of  birds.  It  is  the  same 
dawn.  The  same  dawn.  .  .  .  One  man  says  'God'  and 
thinks  of  a  person  who  is  as  much  of  a  person  as  Joan  is,  and 
another  says  'God'  and  thinks  of  an  idea  more  abstract  than 
the  square  root  of  minus  one.  That's  a  tangle  in  the  pri- 
maries of  thought  and  not  a  difference  in  practical  inten- 
tion. One  can  argue  about  such  things  for  ever.  .  .  .  One 
can  make  a  puzzle  with  a  bit  of  wire  that  will  bother  and 
exasperate  people  for  hours.  Is  it  any  wonder,  then,  if 
stating  what  is  at  the  root  of  life  bothers  and  exasperates 
people?  .  .  . 

"Personally,  I  should  say  now  that  all  religions  are  right, 
and  none  of  them  very  happy  in  the  words  and  symbols  they 
choose.  And  none  of  them  are  calm  enough — not  calm 
enough.  Not  peaceful  enough.  They  are  all  floundering 
about  with  symbols  and  metaphors,  and  it  is  a  pity  they  will 
not  admit  it.  ...  Why  will  people  never  admit  their  intel- 
lectual limitations  in  these  matters?  .  .  .  All  the  great  re- 
ligions have  this  in  common,  this  idea  is  common ;  they  pro- 
fess to  teach  the  universal  brotherhood  of  man  and  the  uni- 
versal reign  of  justice.  Why  argue  about  phrases?  Why 
not  put  it  in  this  fashion?"  .  .  . 

For  a  long  time  Oswald  argued  about  phrases  before  he 
could  get  back  to  the  main  thread  of  his  argument.  .  .  . 

"Men  have  to  be  unified.  They  are  driven  to  seek  Unity. 
And  they  are  still  with  the  individualized  instincts  of  a 
savage.  .  .  .  See  then  what  education  always  has  to  be !  The 
process  of  taking  this  imperfectly  social,  jealous,  deeply 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  563 

savage  creature  and  socializing  him.  The  development  of 
education  and  the  development  of  human  societies  are  one 
and  the  same  thing.  Education  makes  the  social  man.  So 
far  as  schooling  goes,  it  is  quite  plainly  that.  You  teach 
your  solitary  beast  to  read  and  write,  you  teach  him  to  ex- 
press himself  by  drawing,  you  teach  him  other  languages 
perhaps,  and  something  of  history  and  the  distribution  of 
mankind.  What  is  it  all  but  making  this  creature  who 
would  naturally  possess  only  the  fierce,  narrow  sociability  of 
a  savage  family  in  a  cave,  into  a  citizen  in  a  greater  commu- 
nity ?  That  is  how  I  see  it.  That  primarily  is  what  has  been 
done  to  you.  An  uneducated  man  is  a  man  who  can  talk  to  a 
few  score  familiar  people  with  a  few  hundred  words.  You 
two  can  talk  to  a  quarter  of  mankind.  With  the  help  of  a 
little  translation  you  can  get  to  understandings  with  most 
of  mankind.  ...  As  a  child  learns  the  accepted  language 
and  the  accepted  writing  and  the  laws  and  rules  of  life  it 
learns  the  community.  Watching  the  education  of  you  two 
has  made  me  believe  more  and  more  in  the  idea  that,  over 
and  above  the  enlargement  of  expression  and  understanding, 
education  is  the  state  explaining  itself  to  and  incorporating 
the  will  of  the  individual.  .  .  . 

"Yes — but  what  state?  What  state?  Now  we  come  to 
it.  .  .  ." 

Oswald  began  to  sketch  out  a  universal  history.  There  is 
no  limit  to  these  intellectual  enterprises  of  the  small  hours. 

"All  history  is  the  record  of  an  effort  in  man  to  form 
communities,  an  effort  against  resistance — against  instinctive 
resistance.  There  seems  no  natural  and  proper  limit  to  a 
human  community.  (That's  my  great  point,  that.  That  is 
what  I  have  to  tell  them.)  That  is  the  final  teaching  of  His- 
tory, Joan  and  Peter ;  the  very  quintessence  of  History ;  that 
limitlessness  of  the  community.  As  soon  as  men  get  a  com- 
munity of  any  size  organized,  it  begins  forthwith  to  develop 
roads,  wheels,  writing,  ship-building,  and  all  manner  of 
things  which  presently  set  a  fresh  growth  growing  again. 
Let  that,  too,  go  on.  Presently  comes  steam,  mechanical 
traction,  telegraphy,  the  telephone,  wireless,  aeroplanes ;  and 
each  means  an  extension  of  range,  and  each  therefore  de- 
mands a  larger  community.  .  .  .  There  seems  no  limit  to  the 


564  JOAN  AND  PETER 

growth  of  states.  I  remember,  Peter,  a  talk  we  had;  we 
agreed  that  this  hackneyed  analogy  people  draw  between  the 
life  and  death  of  animals  and  the  life  and  death  of  states 
was  bad  and  silly.  It  isn't  the  same  thing,  Joan,  at  all.  An 
animal,  you  see,  has  a  limit  of  size ;  it  develops  no  new  organs 
for  further  growth  when  it  has  reached  that  limit,  it  breeds 
its  successors,  it  ages  naturally;  when  it  dies,  it  dies  for 
good  and  all  and  is  cleared  away.  Exactly  the  reverse  is 
true  of  a  human  community.  Exactly?  Yes,  exactly.  If 
it  can  develop  its  educational  system  steadily — note  that — if 
it  can  keep  up  communications,  a  State  can  go  on  indefinitely, 
conquering,  ousting,  assimilating.  Even  an  amoeba  breaks 
up  after  growth,  but  a  human  community  need  not  do  so. 
And  so  far  from  breeding  successors  it  kills  them  if  it  can- 
like  Frazer's  priest — where  was  it? — Aricia?  The  priest  of 
Diana.  The  priest  of  The  Golden  Bough.  .  .  . 

Oswald  picked  up  his  thread  again  after  a  long,  half 
dreaming  excursion  in  Frazer-land. 

"It  is  just  this  limitlessness,  this  potential  immortality  of 
States  that  makes  all  the  confusion  and  bloodshed  of  history. 
"What  is  happening  in  the  world  today?  What  is  the  essence 
of  it  all?  The  communities  of  today  are  developing  range, 
faster  than  ever  they  did:  aeroplanes,  guns,  swifter  ships, 
everywhere  an  increasing  range  of  action.  That  is  the  most 
important  fact  to  grasp  about  the  modern  world.  It  is  the 
key  fact  in  politics.  From  the  first  dawn  of  the  human  story 
you  see  man  in  a  kind  of  a  puzzled  way — how  shall  I  put  it  ? 
— pursuing  the  boundary  of  his  possible  community.  Which 
always  recedes.  Which  recedes  now  faster  than  ever.  Until 
it  brings  him  to  a  fatal  war  and  disaster.  Over  and  over 
again  it  is  the  same  story.  If  you  had  a  coloured  historical 
atlas  of  the  world,  the  maps  would  be  just  a  series  of  great 
dabs  of  empire,  spreading,  spreading — coming  against  resist- 
ances— collapsing.  Each  dab  tries  to  devour  the  world  and 
fails.  There  is  no  natural  limit  to  a  human  community,  no 
limit  in  time  or  space — except  one. 

"  Genus  Homo,  species  Sapiens,  Mankind,  that  is  the  only 
limit."  (Peter,  perhaps,  might  be  led  up  to  saying 
that.)  .  .  . 

"What  has  the   history   of  education   always  been?     A 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  565 

series  of  little  teaching  chaps  trying  to  follow  up  and  fix  the 
fluctuating  boundaries  of  communities ' ' — an  image  came  into 
Oswald's  head  that  pleased  him  and  led  him  on — "like  an 
insufficient  supply  of  upholsterers  trying  to  overtake  and  tack 
down  a  carpet  that  was  blowing  away  in  front  of  a  gale.  An 
insufficient  supply  of  upholsterers  .  .  .  And  the  carpet  al- 
ways growing  as  it  blows.  That's  good.  .  .  .  They  were 
trying  to  fix  something  they  hadn't  clearly  defined.  And 
you  have  a  lot  of  them  still  hammering  away  at  their  tacks 
when  the  edge  of  the  carpet  has  gone  on  far  ahead.  .  .  . 
That  was  really  the  state  of  education  in  England  when  I  took 
you  two  young  people  in  hand ;  the  carpet  was  in  the  air 
and  most  of  the  schoolmasters,  schoolmistresses,  writers, 
teachers,  journalists,  and  all  who  build  up  and  confirm  ideas 
were  hammering  in  tacks  where  the  carpet  had  been  resting 
the  day  before  yesterday.  .  .  .  But  a  lot  were  not  even  ham- 
mering. No.  They  just  went  easy.  Yes,  that  is  what  I 
mean  when  I  say  that  education  was  altogether  at  loose  ends. 
.  .  .  But  Germany  was  different ;  Germany  was  teaching  and 
teaching  in  schools,  colleges,  press,  everywhere,  this  new  Im- 
perialism of  hers,  a  sort  of  patriotic  melodrama,  with  Britain 
as  Carthage  and  Berlin  instead  of  Rome.  They  pointed  the 
whole  population  to  that  end.  They  taught  this  war.  All 
over  the  world  a  thousand  other  educational  systems  pointed 
in  a  thousand  directions.  .  .  . 

"So  Germany  set  fire  to  the  Phoenix.  .  .  . 

' '  Only  one  other  great  country  had  any  sort  of  state  educa- 
tion. Real  state  education  that  is.  The  United  States  was 
also  teaching  citizenship,  on  a  broader  if  shallower  basis; 
a  wider  citizenship — goodwill  to  all  mankind.  Shallower. 
Shallower  certainly.  But  it  was  there.  A  republican  cul- 
ture. Candour  .  .  .  generosity.  .  .  .  The  world  has  still  to 
realize  its  debt  to  the  common  schools  of  America.  .  .  . 

' '  This  League  of  Free  Nations,  of  which  all  men  are  dream- 
ing and  talking,  this  World  Republic,  is  the  rediscovered  out- 
line, the  proper  teaching  of  all  real  education,  the  necessary 
outline  now  of  human  life.  .  .  .  There  is  nothing  else  to  do, 
nothing  else  that  people  of  our  sort  can  do  at  all,  nothing  but 
baseness,  grossness,  vileness,  and  slavery  unless  we  live  now 
as  a  part  of  that  process  of  a  world  peace.  Our  lives  have 


566  JOAN  AND  PETER 

got  to  be  political  lives.  All  lives  have  to  be  made  political 
lives.  We  can't  run  about  loose  any  more.  This  idea  of  a 
world-wide  commonwealth,  this  ideal  of  an  everlasting  world- 
peace  in  which  we  are  to  live  and  move  and  have  our  being, 
has  to  be  built  up  in  every  school,  in  every  mind,  in  every 
lesson.  'You  belong.  You  belong.  And  the  world  belongs 
to  you. '  .  .  . 

What  ought  one  to  teach  when  one  teaches  geography,  for 
instance,  but  the  common  estate  of  mankind?  Here,  the 
teacher  should  say,  are  mountains  and  beautiful  cities  you 
may  live  to  see.  Here  are  plains  where  we  might  grow  half 
the  food  of  mankind !  Here  are  the  highways  of  our  common 
life,  and  here  are  pleasant  byeways  where  you  may  go !  All 
this  is  your  inheritance.  Your  estate.  To  rejoice  in — and 
serve.  But  is  that  how  geography  is  taught?  .  .  . 

"We  used  to  learn  lists  of  the  British  possessions,  with 
their  total  exports  and  imports  in  money.  I  remember  it  as 
if  it  were  yesterday.  .  .  .  Old  Smugs — a  hot  New  Imperial- 
ist— new  then.  .  .  . 

"Then  what  is  history  but  a  long  struggle  of  men  to  find 
peace  and  safety,  and  how  they  have  been  prevented  by  base- 
ness and  greed  and  folly?  Is  that  right?  No,  folly  and 
baseness — and  hate.  .  .  .  Hate  certainly.  .  .  .  All  history  is 
one  dramatic  story,  of  man  blundering  his  way  from  the 
lonely  ape  to  the  world  commonwealth.  All  history  is  each 
man's  adventure.  But  what  teacher  makes  history  much 
more  than  a  dwarfish  twaddle  about  boundaries  and  kings 
and  wars?  Dwarfish  twaddle.  History!  It  went  nowhere. 
It  did  nothing.  Was  there  ever  anything  more  like  a  crowd 
of  people  getting  into  an  omnibus  without  wheels  than  the 
History  Schools  at  Oxford  ?  Or  your  History  Tripos  ? "  .  .  . 
Oswald  repeated  his  image  and  saw  that  it  was  good.  .  .  . 

"What  is  the  teaching  of  a  language  again  but  teaching 
the  knowledge  of  another  people — an  exposition  of  the  soul  of 
another  people — a  work  of  union?  .  .  .  But  you  see  what  I 
mean  by  all  this;  this  idea  of  a  great  world  of  co-operating 
peoples;  it  is  not  just  a  diplomatic  scheme,  not  something  far 
off  that  Foreign  Offices  are  doing;  it  is  an  idea  that  must 
revolutionize  the  lessons  of  a  child  in  the  nursery  and  alter 
the  maps  upon  every  schoolroom  wall.  And  frame  our  lives 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  567 

altogether.  Or  be  nothing.  The  World  Peace.  To  that  we 
all  belong.  I  have  a  fancy —  As  though  this  idea  had  been 
hovering  over  the  world,  unsubstantial,  unable  to  exist — until 
all  this  blood-letting,  this  torment  and  disaster  gave  it  a 
body.  .  .  . 

"What  I  am  saying  to  you  the  University  ought  to  have 
said  to  you. 

"Instead  of  Universities" — he  sought  for  a  phrase  and 
produced  one  that  against  the  nocturnal  dark  seemed  brilliant 
and  luminous.  "Instead  of  the  University  passant  re- 
gardant, we  want  the  University  militant.  We  want  Uni- 
versities all  round  and  about  the  world,  associated,  working 
to  a  common  end,  drawing  together  all  the  best  minds  and 
the  finest  wills,  a  myriad  of  multi-coloured  threads,  into  one 
common  web  of  a  world  civilization." 

§  7 

Also  that  night  Oswald  made  a  discourse  upon  the  English. 

"  Yours  is  a  great  inheritance,  Joan  and  Peter,"  he  said  to 
the  darkness.  "You  are  young;  that  is  a  great  thing  in 
itself.  The  world  cries  out  now  for  the  young  to  enter  into 
possession.  And  also — do  you  ever  think  of  it? — you  are 
English,  Joan  and  Peter.  .  .  . 

"Let  me  say  something  to  you  before  we  have  done,  some- 
thing out  of  my  heart.  Have  I  ever  canted  patriotism  to 
you  ?  No !  Am  I  an  aggressive  Imperialist  ?  Am  I  not  a 
Home  Ruler?  For  Ireland.  For  India.  The  best  years  of 
my  life  have  been  spent  in  saving  black  men  from  white — 
and  mostly  those  white  men  were  of  our  persuasion,  men  of 
the  buccaneer  strain,  on  the  loot.  But  now  that  we  three  are 
here  together  with  no  one  else  to  hear  us,  I  will  confess.  I 
tell  you  there  is  no  race  and  no  tradition  in  the  whole  world 
that  I  would  change  for  my  English  race  and  tradition.  I 
do  not  mean  the  brief  tradition  of  this  little  Buckingham 
Palace  and  Westminster  system  here  that  began  yesterday 
and  will  end  tomorrow,  I  mean  the  great  tradition  of  the 
English  that  is  spread  all  over  the  earth,  the  tradition  of 
Shakespeare  and  Milton,  of  Newton  and  Bacon,  of  Runny- 
mede  and  Agincourt,  the  tradition  of  the  men  who  speak 


568  JOAN  AND  PETER 

fairly  and  act  fairly,  without  harshness  and  without  fear, 
who  face  whatever  odds  there  are  against  them  and  take  no 
account  of  Kings.  It  is  in  Washington  and  New  York  and 
Christchurch  and  Sydney,  just  as  much  as  it  is  in  Pelham 
Ford.  .  .  .  Well,  upon  us  more  than  upon  any  other  single 
people  rests  now  for  a  time  the  burthen  of  human  destiny. 
Upon  us  and  France.  France  is  the  spear  head  but  we  are 
the  shaft.  If  we  fail,  mankind  may  fail.  We  English  have 
made  the  greatest  empire  that  the  world  has  ever  seen ;  across 
the  Atlantic  we  have  also  made  the  greatest  republic.  And 
these  are  but  phases  in  our  task.  The  better  part  of  our 
work  still  lies  before  us.  The  weight  is  on  us  now.  It  was 
Milton  who  wrote  long  ago  that  when  God  wanted  some  task 
of  peculiar  difficulty  to  be  done  he  turned  to  his  Englishmen. 
And  he  turns  to  us  today.  Old  Milton  saw  English  shine 
clear  and  great  for  a  time  and  then  pass  into  the  darkness. 
.  .  .  He  didn't  lose  his  faith.  .  .  .  Church  and  crown  are  no 
part  of  the  real  England  which  we  inherit.  .  .  . 

"We  have  no  reason  to  be  ashamed  of  our  race  and  coun- 
try, Joan  and  Peter,  for  all  the  confusion  and  blundering  of 
these  last  years.  Our  generals  and  politicians  have  missed 
opportunity  after  opportunity.  I  cannot  talk  yet  of  such 
things.  .  .  .  The  blunderings.  .  .  .  The  slackness.  .  .  .  Han- 
overian England  with  its  indolence,  its  dulness,  its  economic 
uncleanness,  its  canting  individualism,  its  contempt  for  sci- 
ence and  system,  has  been  an  England  darkened,  an  England 

astray .     Young  England  has  had  to  pay  at  last  for  all 

those  wasted  years — and  has  paid.  .  .  .  My  God !  the  men  we 
have  expended  already  in  fighting  these  Germans,  the  brave, 
beautiful  men,  the  jesting  common  men,  the  fresh  boys,  so 
cheerful  and  kind  and  gallant !  .  .  .  And  the  happiness  that 
has  died!  And  the  shame  of  following  after  clumsy,  mean 
leadership  in  the  sight  of  all  the  world !  .  .  .  But  there  rests 
no  stain  on  our  blood.  For  our  people  here  and  for  the 
Americans  this  has  been  a  war  of  honour.  We  did  not  come 
into  this  war  for  sordid  or  narrow  ends.  Our  politicians 
when  they  made  base  treaties  had  to  hide  them  from  our 
people.  .  .  .  Even  in  the  face  of  the  vilest  outrages,  even 
now  the  English  keep  a  balanced  justice  and  will  not  hate 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  569 

the  German  common  men  for  things  they  have  been  forced 
to  do.  Yesterday  I  saw  the  German  prisoners  who  work  at 
Stanton  getting  into  the  train  and  joking  with  their  guard. 
They  looked  well  fed  and  healthy  and  uncowed.  One  car- 
ried a  bunch  of  primroses.  No  one  has  an  ill  word  for  these 
men  on  all  the  country-side.  .  .  .  Does  any  other  people  in 
the  world  treat  prisoners  as  we  treat  them  ?  .  .  . 

' '  Well,  the  time  has  come  for  our  people  now  to  go  on  from 
Empire  and  from  Monroe  doctrine,  great  as  these  ideas  have 
been,  to  something  still  greater ;  the  time  has  come  for  us  to 
hold  out  our  hands  to  every  man  in  the  world  who  is  ready 
for  a  disciplined  freedom.  The  German  has  dreamt  of  set- 
ting up  a  Caesar  over  the  whole  world.  Against  that  we  now 
set  up  a  disciplined  world  freedom.  For  ourselves  and  all 
mankind.  .  .  . 

"Joan  and  Peter,  that  is  what  I  have  been  coming  to  in 
all  this  wandering  discourse.  Yours  is  a  great  inheritance. 
You  and  your  generation  have  to  renew  and  justify  England 
in  a  new  world.  You  have  to  link  us  again  in  a  common 
purpose  with  our  kind  everywhere.  You  have  to  rescue  our 
destinies,  the  destinies  of  the  world,  from  these  stale  quar- 
rels; you  have  to  take  the  world  out  of  the  hands  of  these 
weary  and  worn  men,  these  old  and  oldish  men,  these  men  who 
can  learn  no  more.  You  have  to  reach  back  and  touch  the 
England  of  Shakespeare,  Milton,  Raleigh,  and  Blake — and 
that  means  you  have  to  go  forward.  You  have  to  take  up  the 
English  tradition  as  it  was  before  church  and  court  and  a 
base  imperialism  perverted  it.  You  have  to  become  political. 
Now.  You  have  to  become  responsible.  Now.  You  have  to 
create.  Now.  You,  with  your  fresh  vision,  with  the  lessons 
you  have  learnt  still  burning  bright  in  your  minds,  you  have 
to  remake  the  world.  Listen  when  the  old  men  tell  you  facts, 
for  very  often  they  know.  Listen  when  they  reason,  they 
will  teach  you  many  twists  and  turns.  But  when  they  dog- 
matize, when  they  still  want  to  rule  unquestioned,  and,  above 
all,  when  they  say  'impossible,'  even  when  they  say  'wait — 
be  dilatory  and  discreet,'  push  them  aside.  Their  minds 
squat  crippled  beside  dead  traditions.  .  .  .  That  England  of 
the  Victorian  old  men,  and  its  empire  and  its  honours  and  its 


570  JOAN  AND  PETER 

court  and  precedences,  it  is  all  a  dead  body  now,  it  has  died 
as  the  war  has  gone  on,  and  it  has  to  be  buried  out  of  our  way 
lest  it  corrupt  you  and  all  the  world  again.  ..." 


§  8 

"We  underrate  the  disposition  of  youth  to  think  for  itself. 

Oswald  set  himself  to  deliver  this  Valediction  of  his  after 
dinner  on  Friday  evening.  .  .  . 

Joan  was  hesitating  between  a  game  of  Demon  Patience 
with  Peter — in  which  she  always  played  thirteen  to  his 
eleven  and  usually  won  in  spite  of  the  handicap — and  an 
inclination  for  Bach's  Passacaglia  upon  the  pianola  in  the 
study.  Peter  expressed  himself  ready  for  whatever  she 
chose;  he  would  play  D.P.  or  read  Moll  Flanders — he  had 
just  discovered  the  delight  of  that  greatest  of  all  eighteenth 
century  novels.  He  was  sitting  on  the  couch  in  the  library 
and  Joan  was  standing  upon  the  hearthrug,  regarding  him 
thoughtfully,  when  Oswald  came  in.  He  stopped  to  hear 
what  Peter  was  saying,  with  his  one  eye  intent  on  Joan's 
pretty  gravity. 

"No,"  he  interrupted.     "This  is  my  evening. 

"You  see,"  he  said,  coming  up  to  the  fire :  "I  want  to  talk 
to  you  young  people.  I  want  to  know  some  things —  I 
want  to  know  what  you  make  of  life.  ...  I  want  ...  an  ex- 
change of  views." 

He  stood  with  his  back  to  the  fire  and  smiled  at  Joan's 
grave  face  close  to  his  own.  "I've  got  to  talk  to  you,"  he 
said,  ' '  very  seriously.  It 's  necessary. ' ' 

Having  paralysed  them  by  this  preface  he  sat  down  in  his 
deep  armchair,  pulled  it  an  inch  or  so  towards  the  fire,  and 
leaning  forward,  with  his  eye  on  the  spitting  coals,  began. 

"I  wish  I  could  talk  better,  Joan  and  Peter.  ...  I  know 
I've  never  been  a  good  talker — it's  been  rather  a  loss  between 
us  all.  And  now  particularly.  ...  I  want  to  talk.  .  .  . 
You  must  let  me  get  it  out  in  my  own  way.  .  .  . 

"You  see,"  he  went  on  after  a  moment  or  so  to  rally  his 
forces,  "I've  been  your  guardian,  I've  had  your  education 
and  your  affairs  in  my  hnnds,  for  fifteen  years.  So  far  as 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  571 

the  affairs  go,  Sycamore,  you  know We  won't  go  into 

that.  That 's  all  plain  sailing.  But  it 's  the  education  I  want 
to  talk  about — and  your  future.  You  are  now  both  of  age. 
Well  past.  You're  on  the  verge  of  twenty-five,  Peter — in  a 
month  or  so.  You're  both  off  now — housekeeping.  You're 
dropping  the  pilot.  It 's  high  time,  I  suppose.  ..." 

Joan  glanced  at  Peter,  and  then  sank  noiselessly  into  a 
crouching  attitude  close  to  Oswald's  knee.  He  paused  to 
stroke  her  hair. 

' '  I  've  been  trying  to  get  you  all  that  I  could  get  you.  .  .  . 
Education.  ...  I've  had  to  blunder  and  experiment.  I 
ought  to  tell  you  what  I  've  aimed  at  and  what  I  Ve  done,  take 
stock  with  you  of  the  world  I've  educated  you  for  and  the 
part  you  're  going  to  play  in  it.  Take  stock.  ...  It 's  been  a 
badly  planned  undertaking,  I  know.  But  then  it's  such  a 
surprising  and  unexpected  world.  All  the  time  I've  been 
learning,  and  most  things  I've  learnt  more  or  less  too  late 
to  use  the  knowledge  properly.  ..." 

He  paused. 

Peter  looked  at  his  guardian  and  said  nothing.  Oswald 
patted  the  head  at  his  knee  in  return  for  a  caress.  It  was  an 
evasive,  even  apologetic  pat,  for  he  did  not  want  to  be  dis- 
tracted by  affection  just  then. 

"This  war  has  altered  the  whole  world,"  he  went  on. 
"Life  has  become  stark  and  intense,  and  when  I  took  this  on 
— when  I  took  up  the  task  of  educating  you — our  world  here 
seemed  the  most  wrapped  up  and  comfortable  and  secure 
world  you  can  possibly  imagine.  Comfortable  to  the  pitch 
of  stuffiness.  Most  English  people  didn  't  trouble  a  bit  about 
the  shape  of  human  life;  they  thought  it  was — well,  rather 
like  a  heap  of  down  cushions.  For  them  it  was.  For  most 
of  Europe  and  America.  .  .  .  They  thought  it  was  all  right 
and  perfectly  safe — if  only  you  didn't  bother.  And  educa- 
tion had  lost  its  way.  Yes.  That  puts  the  case.  Education 
had  lost  its  way." 

Oswald  paused  again.  He  fixed  his  one  eye  firmly  on  a 
glowing  cavity  in  the  fire,  as  though  that  contained  the  very 
gist  of  his  thoughts. 

"What  is  education  up  to?"  he  asked.  "What  is  educa- 
tion?" . 


572  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Thereupon  of  course  he  ought  to  have  gone  on  to  the  pas- 
sage beginning,  ''Consider  this  beast  we  are,  this  thing 
man ! "  as  he  had  already  rehearsed  it  overnight.  But  Peter 
had  not  learnt  his  part  properly. 

"I  suppose  it's  fitting  the  square  natural  man  into  the 
round  hole  of  civilized  life,"  Peter  threw  out. 

This  reply  greatly  disconcerted  Oswald.  "Exactly,"  he 
said,  and  was  for  some  moments  at  a  loss. 

"Yes,"  he  said,  rallying.     "But  what  is  civilized  life?" 

"Oh!  .  .  .  Creative  activities  in  an  atmosphere  of  helpful 
goodwill,"  Peter  tried  in  the  brief  pause  that  followed. 

Oswald  had  a  disagreeable  feeling  that  he  was  getting  to 
the  end  of  his  discourse  before  he  delivered  its  beginning. 
"Yes,"  he  said  again.  "Yes.  But  for  that  you  must  have  a 
political  form." 

"The  World  State,"  said  Peter. 

"The  League  of  Free  Nations,"  said  Oswald,  "to  enforce 
Peace  throughout  the  earth." 

The  next  remark  that  came  from  Peter  was  still  more  un- 
expected and  embarrassing. 

' '  Peace  is  nothing, ' '  said  Peter. 

Oswald  turned  his  red  eye  upon  his  ward,  in  profound 
amazement. 

Did  they  differ  fundamentally  in  their  idea  of  the  human 
future  ? 

' '  Peace,  my  dear  Peter,  is  everything, ' '  he  protested. 

"But,  sir,  it's  nothing  more  than  the  absence  of  war.  It's 
a  negative.  In  itself  it's — vacuum.  You  can't  live  in  a 
vacuum. ' ' 

"But  I  mean  an  active  peace." 

"That  would  be  something  more  than  peace.  "War  is  an 
activity.  Peace  is  not.  If  you  take  war  out  of  the  world, 
you  must  have  some  other  activity. ' ' 

' '  But  doesn  't  the  organization  of  the  World  Peace  in  itself 
constitute  an  activity?" 

"That  would  be  a  diminishing  activity,  sir.  Like  a  man 
getting  himself  morphia  and  taking  it  and  going  to  sleep.  A 
"World  Peace  would  release  energy,  and  as  the  energy  was 
released,  if  the  end  were  merely  peace,  there  would  be  less 
need  for  it.  Until  things  exploded. ' ' 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  573 

Great  portions  of  Oswald's  Valediction  broke  away  and 
vanished  for  ever  into  the  limbo  of  unspoken  discourses. 

' '  But  would  you  have  war  go  on,  Peter  ? ' ' 

"Not  in  its  present  form.  But  struggle  and  unification, 
which  is  the  end  sought  in  all  struggles,  must  go  on  in  some 
form,  sir, ' '  said  Peter,  ' '  while  life  goes  on.  We  have  to  get 
the  World  State  and  put  an  end  to  war.  I  agree.  But  the 
real  question  is  what  are  you  going  to  do  with  our  Peace? 
What  struggle  is  to  take  the  place  of  war?  What  is  man- 
kind going  to  do?  Most  wars  have  come  about  hitherto  be- 
cause somebody  was  bored.  Do  you  remember  how  bored  we 
all  were  in  1914  ?  And  the  rotten  way  we  were  all  going  on 
then?  A  World  State  or  a  League  of  Nations  with  nothing 
to  do  but  to  keep  the  peace  will  bore  men  intolerably.  .  .  . 
That's  what  I  like  about  the  Germans." 

"What  you  like  about  the  Germans!"  Oswald  cried  in 
horror. 

"They  did  get  a  move  on,  sir,"  said  Peter. 

"We  don't  want  a  preventive  League  of  Nations,"  Peter 
expanded.  "It's  got  to  be  creative  or  nothing.  Or  else  we 
shall  be  in  a  sort  of  perpetual  Coronation  year — with  nothing 
doing  on  account  of  the  processions.  Horrible!" 

For  a  little  while  Oswald  made  no  reply.  He  could  not 
recall  a  single  sentence  of  the  lost  Valediction  that  was  at  all 
appropriate  here,  and  he  was  put  out  and  distressed  beyond 
measure  that  Peter  could  find  anything  to  "like"  about  the 
Germans. 

"A  World  Peace  for  its  own  sake  is  impossible,"  Peter 
went  on.  "The  Old  Experimenter  would  certainly  put  a 
spoke  into  that  wheel. ' ' 

"Who  is  the  Old  Experimenter?"  asked  Oswald. 

"He's  a  sort  of  God  I  have/'  said  Peter.  "Something 
between  theology  and  a  fairy  tale.  I  dreamt  about  him. 
When  I  was  delirious.  He  doesn't  rule  the  world  or  any- 
thing of  that  sort,  because  he  doesn't  want  to,  but  he 
keeps  on  dropping  new  things  into  it.  To  see  what  happens. 
Like  a  man  setting  himself  problems  to  work  out  in  his 
head.  He  lives  in  a  little  out-of-the-way  office.  That's  the 
idea." 

"You  haven't  told  me  about  him,"  said  Joan. 


574  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"I  shall  some  day,"  said  Peter.  "When  I  feel  so  dis- 
posed. ..." 

"This  is  very  disconcerting,"  said  Oswald,  much  per- 
plexed. He  scowled  at  the  fire  before  him.  "But  you  do 
realize  the  need  there  is  for  some  form  of  world  state  aud 
some  ending  of  war?  Unless  mankind  is  to  destroy  itself 
altogether. ' ' 

"Certainly,  sir,"  said  Peter.  "But  we  aren't  going  to  do 
that  on  a  peace  proposition  simply.  It 's  got  to  be  a  positive 
proposal.  You  know,  sir " 

* '  I  wish  you  'd  call  me  Nobby, ' '  said  Oswald. 

"It's  a  vice  contracted  in  the  army,  this  Sir-ing,"  said 
Peter.  "It's  Nobby  in  my  mind,  anyhow.  But  you  see,  I've 
got  a  kind  of  habit,  at  night  and  odd  times,  of  thinking  over 
my  little  misadventure  with  that  balloon  and  my  scrap  with 
von  Papen.  They  are  my  stock  dreams,  with  extra  details 
worked  in,  nasty  details  some  of  them  .  .  .  and  then  I  wake 
up  and  think  about  them.  I  think  over  the  parachute  affair 
more  than  the  fight,  because  it  lasted  longer  and  I  wasn't 
so  active.  I  felt  it  more.  Especially  being  shot  in  the  legs. 
.  .  .  That  sort  of  dream  when  you  float  helpless.  .  .  .  But 
the  thing  that  impresses  me  most  in  reflecting  on  those  little 
experiences  is  the  limitless  amount  of  intelligence  that  ex- 
pended itself  on  such  jobs  as  breaking  my  wrist,  splintering 
my  shoulder-blade  and  smashing  up  my  leg.  The  amount  of 
ingenuity  and  good  workmanship  in  my  instruments  and  the 
fittings  of  my  basket,  for  example,  was  extraordinary,  having 
regard  to  the  fact  that  it  was  just  one  small  item  in  an  ar- 
tillery system  for  blowing  Germans  to  red  rags.  And  the 
stuff  and  intelligence  they  were  putting  up  against  me,  that 
too  was  wonderful;  the  way  the  whole  problem  had  been 
thought  out,  the  special  clock  fuse  and  so  on.  Well,  my  point 
is  that  the  chap  who  made  that  equipment  wasn  't  particularly 
interested  in  killing  me,  and  that  the  chaps  who  made  my 
outfit  weren't  particularly  keen  on  the  slaughter  of  Germans. 
But  they  had  nothing  else  to  do.  They  were  brought  up  in  a 
pointless  world.  They  were  caught  by  a  vulgar  quarrel. 
What  did  they  care  for  the  Kaiser?  Old  ass!  What  they 
were  interested  in  was  making  the  things.  ..." 

Peter  became  very  earnest  in  his  manner.     "No  peace,  as 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  575 

we  have  known  peace  hitherto,  offers  such  opportunities  for 
good  inventive  work  as  war  does.  That's  my  point,  Nobby. 
There's  no  comparison  between  the  excitement  and  the  end- 
less problems  of  making  a  real,  live,  efficient  submarine,  for 
example,  that  has  to  meet  and  escape  the  intensest  risks,  and 
the  occupation  of  designing  a  great,  big,  safe,  upholstered 
liner  in  which  fat  swindlers  can  cross  the  Atlantic  without 
being  seasick.  War  tempts  imaginative,  restless  people,  and 
a  stagnant  peace  bores  them.  And  you  Ve  got  to  reckon  with 
intelligence  and  imagination  in  this  world,  Nobby,  more  than 
anything.  They  aren't  strong  enough  to  control  perhaps, 
but  they  will  certainly  upset.  Inventive,  restless  men  are  the 
particular  instruments  of  my  Old  Experimenter.  He  pre- 
fers them  now  to  plague,  pestilence,  famine,  flood  and  earth- 
quake. They  are  more  delicate  instruments.  And  more 
efficient.  And  they  won't  stand  a  passive  peace.  Under  no 
circumstances  can  you  hope  to  induce  the  chap  who  contrived 
the  clock  fuse  and  the  chap  who  worked  out  my  gas  bag  or 
the  chap  with  a  new  aeroplane  gadget,  and  me — me,  too — to 
stop  cerebrating  and  making  our  damndest  just  in  order  to 
sit  about  safely  in  meadows  joining  up  daisy  chains — like  a 
beastly  lot  of  figures  by  Walter  Crane.  The  Old  Experi- 
menter finds  some  mischief  still  for  idle 'brains  to  do.  He 
insists  on  it.  That's  fundamental  to  the  scheme  of  things." 

"But  that's  no  reason,"  interrupted  Oswald,  "why  you 
and  the  inventors  who  were  behind  you,  and  the  Germans  who 
made  and  loaded  and  fired  that  shell,  shouldn't  all  get  to- 
gether to  do  something  that  will  grow  and  endure.  Instead 
of  killing  one  another. ' ' 

' '  Ah,  that 's  it ! "  said  Peter.  ' '  But  the  word  for  that  isn  't 
Peace." 

"Then  what  is  the  word  for  it?" 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Peter.  "The  Great  Game,  per- 
haps." 

"And  where  does  it  take  you?" 

Peter  threw  out  his  hands.  "It's  an  exploration,"  he 
said.  "It  will  take  man  to  the  centre  of  the  earth;  it  will 
take  him  to  the  ends  of  space,  between  the  atoms  and  among 
the  stars.  How  can  we  tell  beforehand?  You  must  have 
faith.  But  of  one  thing  I  am  sure,  that  man  cannot  stagnate. 


576  JOAN  AND  PETER 

It  is  forbidden.  It  is  the  uttermost  sin.  Why,  the  Old  Man 
will  come  out  of  his  office  himself  to  prevent  it!  This  war 
and  all  the  blood  and  loss  of  it  is  because  the  new  things  are 
entangled  among  old  and  dead  things,  worn-out  and  silly 
things,  and  we've  not  had  the  vigour  to  get  them  free.  Old 
idiot  nationality,  national  conceit — expanding  to  imperialism, 
nationality  in  a  state  of  megalomania,  has  been  allowed  to  get 
hold  of  the  knife  that  was  meant  for  a  sane  generation  to 
carve  out  a  new  world  with.  Heaven  send  he  cuts  his  own 
throat  this  time !  Or  else  there  may  be  a  next  time.  .  .  .  I  'm 
all  for  the  one  world  state,  and  the  end  of  flags  and  kings 
and  custom  houses.  But  I  have  my  doubts  of  all  this  talk 
of  making  the  world  safe — safe  for  democracy.  I  want  the 
world  made  one  for  the  adventure  of  mankind,  which  is  quite 
another  story.  I  have  been  in  the  world  now,  Nobby,  for 
five-and-twenty  years,  and  I  am  only  beginning  to  suspect 
the  wonder  and  beauty  of  the  things  we  men  might  know  and 
do.  If  only  we  could  get  our  eyes  and  hands  free  of  the  old 
inheritance.  What  has  mankind  done  yet  to  boast  about? 
I  despise  human  history — because  I  believe  in  God.  Not  the 
God  you  don't  approve  of,  Nobby,  but  in  my  Old  Experi- 
menter, whom  I  confess  I  don't  begin  to  understand,  and  in 
the  far-off,  eternal  scheme  he  hides  from  us  and  which  he 
means  us  to  develop  age  by  age.  Oh !  I  don 't  understand 
him,  I  don't  begin  to  explain  him ;  he's  just  a  figure  for  what 
I  feel  is  the  reality.  But  he  is  right,  he  is  wonderful.  And 
instead  of  just  muddling  about  over  the  surface  of  his  uni- 
verse, we  have  to  get  into  the  understanding  of  it  to  the  very 
limits  of  our  ability,  to  live  our  utmost  and  do  the  intensest 
best  we  can." 

"Yes,"  said  Oswald;  "yes."  This  was  after  his  own 
heart,  and  yet  it  did  not  run  along  the  lines  of  the  Valedic- 
tory that  had  flowered  with  such  Corinthian  richness  over- 
night. He  had  been  thinking  then  of  world  peace;  what 
Peter  was  driving  at  now  was  a  world  purpose:  but  weren't 
the  two  after  alt  the  same  thing?  He  sat  with  his  one  eye 
reflecting  the  red  light  of  the  fire,  and  the  phrases  that  had 
come  in  such  generous  abundance  overnight  now  refused  to 
come  at  all. 

Peter,  on  the  couch,  continued  to  think  aloud. 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  577 

"Making  the  world  safe  for  democracy,"  said  Peter. 
' '  That  isn  't  quite  it.  If  democracy  means  that  any  man  may 
help  who  can,  that  school  and  university  will  give  every  man 
and  woman  the  fairest  chance,  the  most  generous  inducement 
to  help,  to  do  the  thing  he  can  best  do  under  the  best  condi- 
tions, then,  Yes;  but  if  democracy  means  getting  up  a  riot 
and  boycott  among  the  stupid  and  lazy  and  illiterate  when- 
ever anything  is  doing,  then  I  say  No!  Every  human  being 
has  got  to  work,  has  got  to  take  part.  If  our  laws  and  or- 
ganization don't  insist  upon  that,  the  Old  Experimenter  will. 
So  long  as  the  world  is  ruled  by  stale  ideas  and  lazy  ideas, 
he  is  determined  that  it  shall  flounder  from  war  to  war. 
Now  what  does  this  democracy  mean  ?  Does  it  mean  a  crowd 
of  primitive  brutes  howling  down  progress  and  organization  ? 
because  if  it  does,  I  want  to  be  in  the  machine-gun  section. 
When  you  talk  of  education,  Nobby,  you  think  of  highly 
educated  people,  of  a  nation  instructed  through  and  through. 
But  what  of  democracy  in  Russia,  where  you  have  a  naturally 
clever  people  in  a  state  of  peasant  ignorance — who  can 't  even 
read?  Until  the  schoolmaster  has  talked  to  every  one  for 
ten  or  twelve  years,  can  you  have  what  President  Wilson 
thinks  of  as  democracy  at  all  ? " 

"Now  there  you  meet  me,"  said  Oswald.  "That  is  the 
idea  I  have  been  trying  to  get  at  with  you."  And  for  some 
minutes  the  palatial  dimensions  of  the  lost  Valedictory 
loomed  out.  Where  he  had  said  "peace"  overnight,  how- 
ever, he  now  said  progress. 

But  the  young  man  on  the  couch  was  much  too  keenly 
interested  to  make  a  good  audience.  When  presently  Oswald 
propounded  his  theory  that  all  the  great  world  religions  were 
on  the  side  of  this  World  Republic  that  he  and  Peter  desired, 
Peter  demurred. 

' '  But  is  that  true  of  Catholicism  for  instance  ? ' '  said  Peter. 

Oswald  quoted,  "  I  am  the  Vine  and  ye  are  the  Branches. ' ' 

"Yes,"  said  Peter.  "But  look  at  the  Church  itself. 
Don't  look  at  the  formula  but  at  the  practice  and  the  daily 
teaching.  Is  it  truly  a  growing  Vine?"  The  reality  of 
Catholicism,  Peter  argued,  was  a  traditional,  sacramental 
religion,  a  narrow  fetish  religion  with  a  specialized  priest,  it 
was  concerned  primarily  with  another  world,  it  set  its  face 


* 


578  JOAN  AND  PETER 

against  any  conception  of  a  scheme  of  progress  in  this  world 
apart  from  its  legend  of  the  sacrifice  of  the  Mass. 

"All  good  Catholics  sneer  at  progress,"  said  Peter. 
''Take  Belloc  and  Chesterton,  for  example;  they  hate  the  idea 
of  men  working  steadily  for  any  great  scheme  of  effort  here. 
They  hold  by  stagnant  standards,  planted  deep  in  the  rich 
mud  of  life.  What 's  the  Catholic  conception  of  human  life  ? 
— guzzle,  booze,  call  the  passion  of  the  sexes  unclean  and 
behave  accordingly,  confess,  get  absolution,  and  at  it  again. 
Is  there  any  recognition  in  Catholicism  of  the  duty  of  keeping 
your  body  fit  or  your  brain  active  ?  They  're  worse  than  the 
man  who  buried  his  talent  in  a  clean  napkin ;  they  bury  it  in 
wheezy  fat.  It's  a  sloven's  life.  What  have  we  in  common 
with  that?  Always  they  are  harking  back  to  the  thirteenth 
century,  to  the  peasant  life  amidst  dung  and  chickens.  It's 
a  different  species  of  mind  from  ours,  with  the  head  and  feet 
turned  backward.  What  is  the  good  of  expecting  the  Pope, 
for  instance,  and  his  Church  to  help  us  in  creating  a  League 
of  Nations?  His  aim  would  be  a  world  agreement  to  stop 
progress,  and  we  want  to  release  it.  He  wants  peace  in 
order  to  achieve  nothing,  and  we  want  peace  in  order  to  do 
everything.  What  is  the  good  of  pretending  that  it  is  the 
same  peace?  A  Catholic  League  of  Nations  would  be  a  con- 
spiracy of  stagnation,  another  Holy  Alliance.  What  real 
world  unity  can  come  through  them?  Every  step  on  the 
way  to  the  world  state  and  the  real  unification  of  men  will 
be  fought  by  the  stagnant  men  and  the  priests.  Why  blind 
ourselves  to  that?  Progress  is  a  religion  in  itself.  Work 
and  learning  are  our  creed.  We  cannot  make  terms  with 
any  other  creed.  The  priest  has  got  his  God  and  we  seek 
our  God  for  ever.  The  priest  is  finished  and  completed 
and  self-satisfied,  and  we — we  are  beginning.  ..." 

§  9 

There  were  two  days  yet  before  Peter  went  back  to  his 
work  in  London.  Saturday  dawned  blue  and  fine,  and  Joan 
and  he  determined  to  spend  it  in  a  long  tramp  over  the  Hert- 
fordshire hills  and  fields.  He  meant  to  stand  no  nonsense 
from  his  foot.  "If  I  can't  walk  four  miles  an  hour  then  I 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  579 

must  do  two,"  he  said.  "And  if  the  pace  is  too  slow  for 
you,  Joan,  you  must  run  round  and  round  me  and  bark." 
They  took  a  long  route  by  field  and  lane  through  Albury 
and  Furneaux  Pelham  to  the  little  inn  at  Stocking  Pelham, 
where  they  got  some  hard  biscuits  and  cheese  and  shandygaff, 
and  came  home  by  way  of  Patmore  Heath,  and  the  golden 
oaks  and  the  rivulet.  And  as  they  went  Peter  talked  of 
Oswald. 

"Naturally  he  wants  to  know  what  we  are  going  to  do," 
said  Peter,  and  then,  rather  inconsequently,  ' '  He 's  ill. 

"This  war  is  like  a  wasting  fever  in  the  blood  and  in  the 
mind,"  said  Peter.  "All  Europe  is  ill.  But  with  him  it 
mixes  with  the  old  fever.  That  splinter  at  Fricourt  was  no 
joke  for  him.  He  oughtn't  to  have  gone  out.  He's  getting 
horribly  lean,  and  his  eye  is  like  a  garnet." 

"I  love  him,"  said  Joan. 

But  she  did  not  want  to  discuss  Oswald  just  then. 

' '  About  this  new  theology  of  yours,  Peter, ' '  she  said.  .  .  . 

"Well?  "said  Peter. 

"What  do  you  mean  by  this  Old  Experimenter  of  yours? 
Is  he— God?" 

"I  don't  know.     I  thought  he  was.     He's He's  a 

Symbol.  He's  just  a  Caricature  I  make  to  express  how  all 
this" — Peter  swept  his  arm  across  the  sunlit  world — "seems 
to  stand  to  me.  If  one  can 't  draw  the  thing  any  better,  one 
has  to  make  a  caricature." 

Joan  considered  that  gravely. 

"I  thought  of  him  first  in  my  dream  as  the  God  of  the 
Universe,"  Peter  explained. 

' '  You  couldn  't  love  a  God  like  that, ' '  Joan  remarked. 

"Heavens,  no!    He's  too  vast,  too  incomprehensible.     I 
love  you — and  Oswald — and  the  R.F.C.,  Joan,  and  biology. 
But  he's  above  and  beyond  that  sort  of  thing." 
'  Could  you  pray  to  him  ? ' '  asked  Joan. 
'Not  to  him,"  said  Peter. 
'  I  pray, ' '  said  Joan.     ' '  Don 't  you  ? ' ' 
'And  swear,"  said  Peter. 
'One  prays  to  something — it  isn't  oneself." 
'The  fashion  nowadays  is  to  speak  of  the  God  in  the 
Heart  and  the  God  in  the  Universe. ' ' 


580  JOAN  AND  PETER 

"Is  it  the  same  God?" 

' '  Leave  it  at  that, ' '  said  Peter.  ' '  "We  don 't  know.  All  the 
waste  and  muddle  in  religion  is  due  to  people  arguing  and 
asserting  that  they  are  the  same,  that  they  are  different  but 
related,  or  that  they  are  different  but  opposed.  And  so  on 
and  so  on.  How  can  we  know?  What  need  is  there  to 
know  ?  In  view  of  the  little  jobs  we  are  doing.  Let  us  leave 
it  at  that." 

Joan  was  silent  for  a  while.  "I  suppose  we  must,"  she 
said. 

"And  what  are  we  going  to  do  with  ourselves,"  asked 
Joan,  ' '  when  the  war  is  over  ? ' ' 

"They  can't  keep  us  in  khaki  for  ever,"  Peter  considered. 
' '  There 's  a  Ministry  of  Reconstruction  foozling  away  in  Lon- 
don, but  it 's  never  said  a  word  to  me  of  the  some-day  that  is 
coming.  I  suppose  it  hasn't  learnt  to  talk  yet." 

"What  do  you  think  of  doing?"  asked  Joan. 

"Well,  first — a  good  medical  degree.  Then  I  can  doctor 
if  I  have  to.  But,  if  I'm  good  enough,  I  shall  do  research. 
I've  a  sort  of  feeling  that  along  the  border  line  of  biology 
and  chemistry  I  might  do  something  useful.  I've  some 
ideas.  ...  I  suppose  I  shall  go  back  to  Cambridge  for  a 
bit.  We  neither  of  us  need  earn  money  at  once.  It  will 
be  queer — after  being  a  grown-up  married  man — to  go  back 
to  proctors  and  bulldogs.  What  are  you  going  to  do,  Joan, 
when  you  get  out  of  uniform  ? ' ' 

' '  Look  after  you  first,  Petah.  Oh !  it 's  worth  doing.  And 
it  won't  take  me  all  my  time.  And  then  I've  got  my  own 
ideas.  ..." 

"Out  with  'em,  Joan." 

"Well " 

"Well?" 

"Petah,  I  shall  learn  plumbing." 

"Jobbing?" 

"No.  And  bricklaying  and  carpentry.  All  I  can.  And 
then  I  am  going  to  start  building  houses." 

"Architect?" 

"As  little  as  possible,"  said  Joan.  "No.  No  beastly 
Architecture  for  Art's  sake  for  me!  Do  you  remember  how 
people  used  to  knock  their  heads  about  at  The  Ingle-Nook? 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  581 

I've  got  some  money.  Why  shouldn't  I  be  able  to  build 
houses  as  well  as  the  fat  builder-men  with  big,  flat  thumbs 
who  used  to  build  houses  before  the  war?" 

"Jerry-building?" 

"High-class  jerry-building,  if  you  like.  Cottages  with 
sensible  insides,  real  insides,  and  not  so  much  waste  space 
and  scamping  to  make  up  for  it.  They're  half  a  million 
houses  short  in  this  country  already.  There's  something 
in  building  appeals  to  my  sort  of  imagination.  And  I'm  go- 
ing to  make  money,  Petah. " 

"I  love  the  way  you  carry  your  tail,"  said  Peter.  "Al- 
ways." 

"Well,  doing  running  repairs  hardens  a  woman's  soul." 

"You'll  make  more  money  than  I  shall,  perhaps.  But  now 
I  begin  to  understand  all  these  extraordinary  books  you've 
been  studying.  ...  I  might  have  guessed.  .  .  .  Why  not?" 

He  limped  along,  considering  it.  "Why  shouldn't  you?" 
he  said.  "A  service  flat  will  leave  your  hands  free.  .  .  . 
I've  always  wondered  secretly  why  women  didn't  plunge 
into  that  sort  of  business  more." 

"It's  been  just  diffidence,"  said  Joan. 

"Click!"  said  Peter.  "That's  gone,  anyhow.  If  a  lot 
of  women  do  as  you  do  and  become  productive  for  good,  this 
old  muddle  of  a  country  will  sit  up  in  no  time.  It  doubles 
the  output.  ...  I  wonder  if  the  men  will  like  working  under 
you?" 

"There'll  be  a  boss  in  the  background,"  said  Joan;  "Mr. 
John  Debenham.  Who'll  never  turn  up.  Being,  in  fact, 
no  more  than  camouflage  for  Joan  of  that  ilk.  I  shall  be 
just  my  own  messenger  and  agent. 

"One  thing  I  know,"  said  Joan,  "and  that  is,  that  I 
will  make  a  cottage  or  a  flat  that  won't  turn  a  young  woman 
into  an  old  one  in  ten  years'  time.  Living  in  that  Jepsoii 
flat  without  a  servant  has  brightened  me  up  in  a  lot  of  ways. 
.  .  .  And  a  child  will  grow  up  in  my  cottages  without  being 
crippled  in  its  mind  by  awkwardness  and  ugliness.  .  .  .  This 
sort  of  thing  always  has  been  woman's  work  really.  Only 
we've  been  so  busy  chittering  and  powdering  our  silly  noses 
— and  laying  snares  for  our  Peters.  Who  didn't  know  what 
was  good  for  them." 


582  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter  laughed  and  was  amused.  He  felt  a  pleasant  assur- 
ance that  Joan  really  was  going  to  build  houses. 

"Joan,"  he  said,  "it's  a  bleak  world  before  us — and  I 
hate  to  think  of  Nobby.  He's  so  ill.  But  the  work — the 
good  hard  work — there's  times  when  I  rather  like  to  think  of 
that.  .  .  .  They  were  beastly  years  just  before  the  war." 

"I  hated  them,"  said  Joan. 

"But  what  a  lot  of  stuff  there  was  about!"  said  Peter. 
"The  petrol!  Given  away,  practically,  along  the  roadside 
everywhere.  And  the  joints  of  meat.  Do  you  remember 
the  big  hams  we  used  to  have  on  the  sideboard  ?  For  break- 
fast. A  lot  of  sausages  going  sizzle !  Eggs  galore !  Bacon  ! 
Haddock.  Perhaps  cutlets.  And  the  way  one  could  run  off 
abroad!" 

"To  Italy,"  said  Joan  dangerously. 

"God  knows  when  those  times  will  come  back  again !  Not 
for  years.  Not  for  our  lifetimes." 

"If  they  came  back  all  at  once  we'd  have  indigestion," 
said  Joan. 

"Orgy,"  said  Peter.    "But  they  won't."  .  .  . 

Presently  their  note  became  graver. 

"We've  got  to  live  like  fanatics.  If  a  lot  of  us  don't  live 
like  fanatics,  this  staggering  old  world  of  ours  won't  re- 
cover. It  will  stagger  and  then  go  flop.  And  a  race  of 
Bolshevik  peasants  will  breed  pigs  among  the  ruins.  We 
owe  it  to  ourselves,  we  owe  it  to  the  world  to  prevent  that. ' ' 

"And  we  owe  it  to  the  ones  who  have  died,"  said  Joan. 

She  hesitated,  and  then  she  began  to  tell  him  something 
of  the  part  Wilmington  had  played  in  their  lives. 

They  went  through  field  after  field,  through  gates  and 
over  stiles  and  by  a  coppice  spangled  with  primroses,  while 
she  told  him  of  the  part  that  Wilmington  had  played  in  bring- 
ing them  together ;  Wilmington  who  was  now  no  more  than 
grey  soil  where  the  battle  still  raged  in  France.  Many  were 
the  young  people  who  talked  so  of  dead  friends  in  those  days. 
Their  voices  became  grave  and  faintly  deferential,  as  though 
they  had  invoked  a  third  presence  to  mingle  with  their  duo- 
logue. They  were  very  careful  to  say  nothing  and  to  think 
as  little  as  possible  that  might  hurt  Wilmington's  self-love. 

Presently  they  found  themselves  speculating  again  about 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  583 

the  kind  of  world  that  lay  ahead  of  them — whether  it  would 
be  a  wholly  poor  world  or  a  poverty-struck  world  infested 
and  devastated  by  a  few  hundred  millionaires  and  their  fol- 
lowings.  Poor  we  were  certain  to  be.  We  should  either 
be  sternly  poor  or  meanly  poor.  But  Peter  was  disposed  to 
doubt  whether  the  war  millionaires  would  "get  away  with 
the  swag." 

"There's  too  much  thinking  and  reading  nowadays  for 
that,"  said  Peter.  ''They  won't  get  away  with  it.  This  is 
a  new  age,  Joan.  If  they  try  that  game  they  won't  have  five 
years'  run." 

No,  it  would  be  a  world  generally  poor,  a  tired  but  chast- 
ened world  getting  itself  into  order  again.  .  .  .  Would 
there  be  much  music  in  the  years  ahead?  Much  writing  or 
art?  Would  there  be  a  new  theatre  and  the  excitement  of 
first  nights  again  ?  Should  we  presently  travel  by  aeroplane, 
and  find  all  the  world  within  a  few  days'  journey?  They 
were  both  prepared  to  resign  themselves  to  ten  years'  of  work 
and  scarcity,  but  they  both  clung  to  the  hope  of  returning 
prosperity  and  freedom  after  that. 

"Well,  well,  Joan,"  said  Peter,  "these  times  teach  us  to 
love.  I  'm  crippled.  We  've  got  to  work  hard.  But  I  'm  not 
unhappy.  I'm  happier  than  I  was  when  I  had  no  idea  of 
what  I  wanted  in  life,  when  I  lusted  for  everything  and 
was  content  with  nothing,  in  the  days  before  the  war.  I'm 
a  wise  old  man  now  with  my  stiff  wrist  and  my  game  leg. 
You  change  everything,  Joan.  You  make  everything  worth 
while." 

"I'd  like  to  think  it  was  me,"  said  Joan  idiomatically. 

"It's  you.  .  .  . 

"After  all  there  must  be  some  snatches  of  holiday.  I  shall 
walk  with  you  through  beautiful  days — as  we  are  doing  to- 
day— days  that  would  only  be  like  empty  silk  purses  if  it 
wasn't  that  they  held  you  in  them.  Scenery  and  flowers  and 
sunshine  mean  nothing  to  me — until  you  come  in.  I  'm  blind 
until  you  give  me  eyes.  Joan,  do  you  know  how  beautiful 
you  are?  When  you  smile?  When  you  stop  to  think? 
Frowning  a  little.  When  you  look — yes,  just  like  that." 

"No!"  said  Joan,  but  very  cheerfully. 

"But  you  are — you  are  endlessly  beautiful.     Endlessly. 


584  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Making  love  to  Joan — it's  the  intensest  of  joys.  Every 
time As  if  one  had  just  discovered  her." 

"There's  a  certain  wild  charm  about  Petah,"  Joan  ad- 
mitted, "for  a  coarse  taste." 

"After  all,  whether  it's  set  in  poverty  or  plenty,"  said 
Peter;  "whether  it's  rational  or  irrational,  making  love  is 
still  at  the  heart  of  us  humans. "... 

For  a  time  they  exulted  shamelessly  in  themselves.  They 
talked  of  the  good  times  they  had  had  together  in  the  past. 
They  revived  memories  of  Bungo  Peter  and  the  Sagas  that 
had  slumbered  in  silence  since  the  first  dawn  of  adolescence. 
She  recalled  a  score  of  wonderful  stories  and  adventures 
that  he  had  altogether  forgotten.  She  had  a  far  clearer  and 
better  memory  for  such  things  than  he.  "D'you  remember 
lightning  slick,  Petah?  And  how  the  days  went  faster? 
D'you  remember  how  he  put  lightning  slick  on  his  bi- 
cycle?" .  .  . 

But  Peter  had  forgotten  that. 

"And  when  we  fought  for  that  picshua  you  made  of 
Adela,"  Joan  said.  "When  I  bit  you.  ...  It  was  my  first 
taste  of  you,  Petah.  You  tasted  dusty.  ..." 

' '  I  suppose  we  've  always  had  a  blind  love  for  each  other, ' ' 
said  Peter,  "always." 

"I  hated  you  to  care  for  any  one  but  myself,"  said  Joan, 
"since  ever  I  can  remember.  I  hated  even  Billy." 

"It's  well  we  found  out  in  time,"  said  Peter. 

"1  found  out,"  said  Joan. 

' '  Ever  since  we  stopped  being  boy  and  girl  together, ' '  said 
Peter,  "I've  never  been  at  peace  in  my  nerves  and  temper 
till  now.  .  .  .  Now  I  feel  as  though  I  swung  free  in  life, 
safe,  sure,  content." 

"Content,"  weighed  Joan  suspiciously.  "But  you're  still 
in  love  with  me,  Petah  ? ' ' 

"Not  particularly  in  love,"  said  Peter.  "No.  But  I'm 
loving  you — as  the  June  sun  loves  an  open  meadow,  shining 
all  over  it.  I  shall  always  love  you,  Joan,  because  there 
is  no  one  like  you  in  all  the  world.  No  one  at  all.  Making 
love  happens,  but  love  endures.  How  can  there  be  compan- 
ionship and  equality  except  between  the  like? — who  can 
keep  step,  who  can  climb  together,  joke  broad  and  shameless, 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  585 

and  never  struggle  for  the  upper  hand?  And  where  in 
all  the  world  shall  I  find  that,  Joan,  but  in  you?  Listen  to 
wisdom,  Joan!  There  are  two  sorts  of  love  between  men 
and  women,  and  only  two — love  like  the  love  of  big  car- 
nivores who  know  their  mates  and  stick  to  them,  or  love  like 
some  man  who  follows  a  woman  home  because  he's  never 
seen  anything  like  her  before.  I've  done  with  that  sort  of 
love  for  ever.  There's  men  who  like  to  exaggerate  every 
difference  in  women.  They  pretend  women  are  mysterious 
and  dangerous  and  wonderful.  They  like  sex  served  up 
with  lies  and  lingerie.  .  .  .  Where's  the  love  in  that?  Give 
me  my  old  brown  Joan." 

"Not  so  beastly  brown,"  said  Joan. 

"Joan  nature." 

"Tut,  tut!"  said  Joan. 

"There's  people  who  scent  themselves  to  make  love," 
said  Peter. 

"Experienced  Petah, "  said  Joan. 

"I've  read  of  it,"  said  Peter,  and  a  little  pause  fell  be- 
tween them.  .  .  . 

"Every  one  ought  to  be  like  us,"  said  Joan  sagely,  with 
the  spring  sunshine  on  her  dear  face. 

"It  takes  all  sorts  to  make  a  world,"  said  Peter. 

"Everybody  ought  to  have  a  lover,"  said  Joan.  "Every- 
body. There's  no  clean  life  without  it."  .  .  . 

"We've  been  through  some  beastly  times,  Joan.  We've 
run  some  beastly  risks.  .  .  .  We've  just  scrambled  through, 
Joan,  to  love — as  I  scrambled  through  to  life.  After  being 
put  down  and  shot  at."  .  .  . 

Presently  Joan  suspected  a  drag  in  Peter's  paces  and  de- 
cided at  the  sight  of  a  fallen  tree  in  a  little  grass  lane  to 
profess  fatigue.  They  sat  down  upon  the  scaly  trunk, 
just  opposite  to  where  a  gate  pierced  a  budding  hedge  and 
gave  a  view  of  a  long,  curved  ridge  of  sunlit  blue,  shooting 
corn  with  red  budding  and  green-powdered  trees  beyond, 
and  far  away  a  woldy  upland  rising  out  of  an  intervening 
hidden  valley.  And  Peter  admitted  that  he,  too,  felt  a  little 
tired.  But  each  was  making  a  pretence  for  the  sake  of  the 
other. 

" We've  rediscovered  a  lot  of  the  old  things,  Joan,"  said 


586  JOAN  AND  PETER 

Peter.  "The  war  has  knocked  sense  into  us.  There  wasn't 
anything  to  work  for,  there  wasn  't  much  to  be  loyal  to  in  the 
days  of  the  Marconi  scandals  and  the  Coronation  Durbar. 
Slack  times,  more  despair  in  them  by  far  than  in  these  red 
days.  Rotten,  aimless  times.  .  .  .  Oh !  the  world 's  not  done 
for.  .  .  . 

"I  don't  grudge  my  wrist  or  my  leg,"  said  Peter.  "I 
can  hop.  I've  still  got  five  and  forty  years,  fifty  years, 
perhaps,  to  spend.  In  this  new  world."  .  .  . 

He  said  no  more  for  a  time.  There  were  schemes  in  his 
head,  so  immature  as  yet  that  he  could  not  even  sketch 
them  out  to  her. 

He  sat  with  his  eyes  dreaming,  and  Joan  watched  him. 
There  was  much  of  the  noble  beast  in  this  Peter  of  hers.  In 
the  end  now,  she  was  convinced,  he  was  going  to  be  an  alto- 
gether noble  beast.  Through  her.  He  was  hers  to  cherish, 
to  help,  to  see  grow.  .  .  .  He  was  her  chosen  man.  .  .  . 
Depths  that  were  only  beginning  to  awaken  in  Joan  were 
stirred.  She  would  sustain  Peter,  and  also  presently  she 
would  renew  Peter.  A  time  would  come  when  this  dear 
spirit  would  be  born  again  within  her  being,  when  the  blood 
in  her  arteries  and  all  the  grace  of  her  body  would  be  given 
to  a  new  life — to  new  lives,  that  would  be  beautiful  varia- 
tions of  this  dearest  tune  in  the  music  of  the  world.  .  .  . 
They  would  have  courage ;  they  would  have  minds  like  bright, 
sharp  swords.  They  would  lift  their  chins  as  Peter  did.  .  .  . 
It  became  inconceivable  to  Joan  that  women  could  give  their 
bodies  to  bear  the  children  of  unloved  men.  "Dear  Petah," 
her  lips  said  silently.  Her  heart  swelled;  her  hands  tight- 
ened. She  wanted  to  kiss  him.  .  .  . 

Then  in  a  whim  of  reaction  she  was  moved  to  mockery. 

"Do  you  feel  so  very  stern  and  strong,  dear  Petah?"  she 
whispered  close  to  his  shoulder. 

He  started,  surprised,  stared  at  her  for  a  moment,  and 
smiled  into  her  eyes. 

"Old  Joan,"  he  said  and  kissed  her.  .  .  . 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  587 

§  10 

When  he  returned  to  the  house  on  Monday  morning  after 
he  had  seen  the  two  young  people  oif,  a  burthen  of  desolation 
came  upon  Oswald. 

It  was  a  loneliness  as  acute  as  a  physical  pain.  It  was 
misery.  If  they  had  been  dead,  he  could  not  have  been  more 
unhappy.  The  work  that  had  been  the  warm  and  living 
substance  of  fifteen  years  was  now  finished'  and  done.  The 
nest  was  empty.  The  road  and  the  stream,  the  gates  and 
the  garden,  the  house  and  the  hall,  seemed  to  ache  with 
emptiness  and  desertion.  He  went  into  their  old  study, 
from  which  they  had  already  taken  a  number  of  their  most 
intimate  treasures,  and  which  was  now  as  disordered  as  a 
room  after  a  sale.  Most  of  their  remaining  personal  pos- 
sessions were  stacked  ready  for  removal ;  discarded  magazines 
and  books  and  torn  paper  made  an  untidy  heap  beside  the 
fireplace.  "I  could  not  feel  a  greater  pain  if  I  had  lost  a 
son,"  he  thought,  staring  at  these  untidy  vestiges. 

lie  went  to  his  own  study  and  sat  down  at  his  desk,  though 
he  knew  there  was  no  power  of  attention  in  him  sufficient 
to  begin  work. 

Mrs.  Moxton,  for  reasons  best  known  to  herself,  was  in- 
terested in  his  movements  that  morning.  She  saw  him 
presently  wander  into  the  garden  and  then  return  to  the 
hall.  He  took  his  cap  and  stick  and  touched  the  bell.  "I'll 
not  be  back  to  lunch,  Mrs.  Moxton,"  he  called. 

"Very  well,  sir,"  said  Mrs.  Moxton,  unseen  upon  the  land- 
ing above,  nodding  her  head  approvingly. 

At  first  the  world  outside  was  as  lonely  as  his  study. 

He  went  up  the  valley  along  the  high  road  for  half  a 
mile,  and  then  took  a  winding  lane  under  almost  over- 
hanging boughs — the  hawthorn  leaves  now  were  nearly  out 
and  the  elder  quite — up  over  the  hill  and  thence  across  fields 
and  through  a  wood  until  he  came  to  where  the  steep  lane 
runs  down  to  Braughing.  And  by  that  time,  although  the 
spring-time  world  was  still  immensely  lonely  and  comfortless, 
he  no  longer  felt  that  despairful  sense  of  fresh  and  irreme- 
diable loss  with  which  he  started.  He  was  beginning  to  real- 


588  JOAN  AND  PETER 

ize  now  that  he  had  always  been  a  solitary  being;  that  all 
men,  even  in  crowds,  carry  a  certain  solitude  with  them ;  and 
loneliness  thus  lifted  to  the  level  of  a  sustained  and  general 
experience  ceased  to  feel  like  a  dagger  turning  in  his  heart. 

Down  the  middle  of  Braughing  village,  among  spaces  of 
grass,  runs  the  little  Quin,  now  a  race  of  crystalline  water 
over  pebbly  shallows  and  now  a  brown  purposefulness 
flecked  with  foam,  in  which  reeds  bend  and  recover  as  if 
they  kept  their  footing  by  perpetual  feats  of  dexterity. 
There  are  two  fords,  and  midway  between  them  a  little 
bridge  with  a  handrail  on  which  Oswald  stayed  for  a  time, 
watching  the  lives  and  adventures  of  an  endless  stream  of 
bubbles  that  were  begotten  thirty  feet  away  where  the  eddy 
from  the  depths  beneath  a  willow  root  dashed  against  a 
bough  that  bobbed  and  dipped  in  the  water.  He  found  a 
great  distraction  and  relief  in  following  their  adven- 
tures. On  they  came,  large  and  small,  in  strings,  in  spin- 
ning groups,  busy  bubbles,  quiet  bubbles,  dignified  solitary 
bubbles,  and  passed  a  dangerous  headland  of  watercress 
and  ran  the  gauntlet  between  two  big  stones  and  then,  if 
they  survived,  came  with  a  hopeful  rush  for  the  shadow  un- 
der the  bridge  and  vanished  utterly.  .  .  . 

For  all  the  rest  of  the  day  those  streaming  bubbles  glit- 
tered and  raced  and  jostled  before  Oswald's  eyes,  and  made 
a  veil  across  his  personal  desolation.  His  mind  swung  like  a 
pendulum  between  two  ideas ;  those  bubbles  were  like  human 
life;  they  were  not  like  human  life.  .  .  . 

Philosophy  is  the  greatest  of  anodynes. 

"Why  is  a  man's  life  different  from  a  bubble?  Like  a 
bubble  he  is  born  of  the  swirl  of  matter,  like  a  bubble  he  re- 
flects the  universe,  he  is  driven  and  whirled  about  by  forces 
he  does  not  comprehend,  he  shines  here  and  is  darkened 
there  and  is  elated  or  depressed  he  knows  not  why,  and  at 
last  passes  suddenly  out  into  the  darkness.  ..." 

'  In  the  evening  Oswald  sat  musing  by  his  study  fire,  his 
lamp  unlit.  Pie  sat  in  an  attitude  that  had  long  become 
habitual  to  him,  with  the  scarred  side  of  his  face  resting  upon 
and  'hidden  by  his  hand.  His  walk  had  wearied  him,  but 
not  unpleasantly,  his  knee  was  surprisingly  free  from  pain, 
and  he  was  no  longer  acutely  unhappy.  The  idea,  a  very 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  589 

engaging  idea,  had  come  into  his  head  that  it  was  not  really 
the  education  of  Joan  and  Peter  that  had  come  to  an  end,  but 
his  own.  They  were  still  learners — how  much  they  had  still 
to  learn!  At  Peter's  age  he  had  not  yet  gone  to  Africa. 
They  had  finished  with  school  and  college  perhaps,  but  they 
were  but  beginning  in  the  university  of  life.  Neither  of  them 
had  yet  experienced  a  great  disillusionment,  neither  of  them 
had  been  shamed  or  bitterly  disappointed;  they  had  each 
other.  They  had  seen  the  great  war  indeed,  and  Peter  knew 
now  what  wounds  and  death  were  like — but  he  himself  had 
been  through  that  at  one-and-twenty.  Neither  had  had  any 
such  dark  tragedy  as,  for  example,  if  one  of  them  had  been 
killed,  or  if  one  of  them  had  betrayed  and  injured  the  other. 
Perhaps  they  would  always  have  fortunate  lives. 

But  he  himself  had  had  to  learn  the  lesson  to  the  end. 
His  life  had  been  a  darkened  one.  He  had  loved  intensely 
and  lost.  He  had  had  to  abandon  his  chosen  life  work  when 
it  was  barely  half  done.  He  had  a  present  sense  of  the  great 
needs  of  the  world,  and  he  was  bodily  weak  and  mentally 
uncertain.  He  would  spend  days  now  of  fretting  futility, 
unable  to  achieve  anything.  He  loved  these  dear  young- 
sters, but  the  young  cannot  give  love  to  the  old  because 
they  do  not  yet  understand.  He  was  alone.  And  yet, 
it  was  strange,  he  kept  on.  With  such  strength  as  he  had 
he  pursued  his  ends.  Those  two  would  go  on,  full  of  hope, 
helping  one  another,  thinking  together,  succeeding.  The 
lesson  he  had  learnt  was  that  without  much  love,  without 
much  vitality,  with  little  hope  of  seeing  a  single  end  achieved 
for  which  he  worked,  he  could  still  go  on. 

He  drifted  through  his  memories,  seeking  for  the  motives 
that  had  driven  him  on  from  experience  to  experience.  But 
while  he  could  remember  the  experiences  it  was  very  hard 
now  to  recover  any  inkling  of  his  motives.  He  remembered 
himself  at  school  as  a  violent  egotist,  working  hard,  openly 
and  fairly,  for  his  ascendancy  in  the  school  games,  work- 
ing hard  secretly  for  his  school  position.  It  seemed  now  as 
though  all  that  time  he  had  been  no  more  than  a  greed  and 
a  vanity.  .  .  .  Was  that  fair  to  himself?  Or  had  he  for- 
gotten the  redeeming  dreams  of  youth  ?  .  .  . 

The  scene  shifted  to  the  wardroom  of  his  first  battleship, 


590  JOAN  AND  PETER 

and  then  to  his  first  battle.  He  saw  again  the  long  low  line 
of  the  Egyptian  coast,  and  the  batteries  of  Alexandria  and 
Kamleh  spitting  fire  and  the  Condor  standing  in.  He  re- 
called the  tense  excitement  of  that  morning,  the  boats  row- 
ing to  land,  but  strangely  enough  the  incident  that  had  won 
him  the  Victoria  Cross  had  been  blotted  completely  from  his 
mind  by  his  injury.  He  could  not  recover  even  the  facts, 
much  less  the  feel  of  that  act.  .  .  .  Why  had  he  done  what 
he  had  done?  Did  he  himself  really  do  it?  ...  Then  very 
vividly  came  the  memory  of  his  first  sight  of  his  smashed, 
disfigured  face.  That  had  been  horrible  at  the  time — in  a 
way  it  was  horrible  still — but  after  that  it  seemed  as  though 
for  the  first  time  he  had  ceased  then  to  be  an  egotism,  a 
vanity.  After  that  the  memories  of  impersonal  interests 
began.  He  thought  of  his  attendance  at  Huxley's  lectures 
at  South  Kensington  and  the  wonder  of  making  his  first  dis- 
sections. About  that  time  he  met  Dolly,  but  here  again  was 
a  queer  gap ;  he  could  not  remember  anything  very  distinctly 
about  his  early  meetings  with  Dolly  except  that  she  wore 
white  and  that  they  happened  in  a  garden. 

Yet,  in  a  little  while,  all  his  being  had  been  hungry  for 
Dolly ! 

With  his  first  journey  into  Africa  all  his  memories  became 
brighter  and  clearer  and  as  if  a  hotter  sun  shone  upon  them. 
Everything  before  that  time  was  part  of  the  story  of  a  young 
man  long  vanished  from  the  world,  young  Oswald,  a  per- 
sonality at  least  as  remote  as  Peter — very  like  Peter.  But 
with  the  change  of  scene  to  Africa  Oswald  became  himself. 
The  man  in  the  story  was  the  man  who  sat  musing  in  the 
study  chair,  moved  by  the  same  motives  and  altogether  un- 
derstandable. Already  in  Nyasaland  he  was  working  con- 
sciously for  "civilization"  even  as  he  worked  today.  Ev- 
erything in  that  period  lived  still,  with  all  its  accompanying 
feelings  alive.  He  fought  again  in  his  first  fight  in  Nyasa- 
land, and  recalled  with  complete  vividness  how  he  had  loaded 
and  fired  and  reloaded  and  fired  time  after  time  at  the 
rushes  of  the  Yao  spearmen;  he  had  fought  leaning  against 
the  stockade  because  he  was  too  weary  to  stand  upright,  and 
with  his  head  and  every  limb  aching.  One  man  he  had  hit 
had  wriggled  for  a  long  time  in  the  grass,  and  that  memory 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  591 

still  distressed  him.  It  trailed  another  memory  of  horror 
with  it.  In  his  campaign  about  Lake  Kioga,  years  later,  in 
a  fight  amidst  some  ant  hills  he  had  come  upon  a  wounded 
Sudanese  being  eaten  alive  by  swarms  of  ants.  The  poor 
devil  had  died  with  the  ants  still  upon  him.  .  .  .  Oswald 
could  still  recall  the  sick  anguish  with  which  he  had  tried 
in  vain  to  save  or  relieve  this  man. 

The  affair  was  in  the  exact  quality  of  his  present  feelings ; 
the  picture  was  painted  from  the  same  palette.  He  re- 
membered that  then,  as  now,  he  felt  the  same  helpless  per- 
plexity at  apparently  needless  and  unprofitable  human 
agony.  And  then,  as  now,  he  had  not  despaired.  He  had 
been  able  to  see  no  reason  in  this  suffering  and  no  excuse  for 
it ;  he  could  see  none  now,  and  yet  he  did  not  despair.  Why 
did  not  that  and  a  hundred  other  horrors  overwhelm  him 
with  despair?  Why  had  he  been  able  to  go  on  with  life 
after  that?  And  after  another  exquisite  humiliation  and 
disappointment?  He  had  loved  Dolly  intensely,  and  here 
again  came  a  third  but  less  absolutely  obliterated  gap  in  his 
recollections.  For  years  he  had  been  resolutely  keeping  his 
mind  off  the  sufferings  of  that  time,  and  now  they  were  in- 
distinct. His  memory  was  particularly  blank  now  about 
Arthur;  he  was  registered  merely  as  a  blonde  sort  of  ass 
with  a  tenor  voice  who  punched  copper.  That  faint  hostile 
caricature  was  all  his  mind  had  tolerated.  But  still  sharp 
and  clear,  as  though  it  had  been  photographed  but  yesterday 
upon  his  memory,  was  the  afternoon  when  he  had  realized 
that  Dolly  was  dead.  That  scene  was  life-size  and  intense; 
how  in  a  shady  place  under  great  trees,  he  had  leant  for- 
wards upon  his  little  folding  table  and  wept  aloud. 

What  had  carried  him  through  all  those  things?  Why  had 
he  desired  so  intensely?  Why  had  he  worked  so  industri- 
ously? Why  did  he  possess  this  passion  for  order  that  had 
inspired  his  administrative  work?  Why  had  he  given  his 
best  years  to  Uganda?  Why  had  he  been  so  concerned  for 
the  welfare  and  wisdom  of  Joan  and  Peter?  Why  did  he 
work  now  to  the  very  breaking-point,  until  sleeplessness  and 
fever  forced  him  to  rest,  for  this  dream  of  a  great  federation 
in  the  world — a  world  state  he  would  certainly  never  live 
to  see  established?  If  he  was  indeed  only  a  bubble,  then 


592  JOAN  AND  PETER 

surely  he  was  the  most  obstinately  opinionated  of  bubbles. 
But  he  was  not  merely  a  bubble.  The  essential  self  of  him 
was  not  this  thing  that  spun  about  in  life,  that  felt  and 
reflected  the  world,  that  missed  so  acutely  the  two  dear  other 
bubbles  that  had  circled  about  him  so  long  and  that  had  now 
left  him  to  eddy  in  his  backwater  while  they  hurried  off 
into  the  midstream  of  life.  His  essential  self,  the  self  that 
mused  now,  that  had  struggled  up  through  the  egotisms  of 
youth  to  this  present  predominance,  was  something  deeper 
and  tougher  and  more  real  than  desire,  than  excitement,  than 
pleasure  or  pain.  That  was  the  lesson  he  had  been  learning. 
There  was  something  deeper  in  him  to  which  he  had  been 
getting  down  more  and  more  as  life  had  gone  on,  something 
to  which  all  the  stuff  of  experience  was  incidental,  something 
in  which  there  was  endless  fortitude  and  an  undying  resolu- 
tion to  do.  There  was  something  in  him  profounder  than 
the  stream  of  accidents.  .  .  . 

He  sat  now  with  his  distresses  allayed,  his  mind  playing 
with  fancies  and  metaphors  and  analogies.  Was  this  pro- 
founder  contentment  beneath  his  pains  and  discontents  the 
consciousness  of  the  bubble  giving  way  to  the  underlying 
consciousness  of  the  stream?  That  was  ingenious,  but  it 
was  not  true.  Men  are  not  bubbles  carried  blindly  on  a 
stream;  they  are  rather  like  bubbles,  but  that  is  all.  They 
are  wills  and  parts  of  a  will  that  is  neither  the  slave  of  the 
stream  of  matter  nor  a  thing  indifferent  to  it,  that  is  para- 
doxically free  and  bound.  They  are  parts  of  a  will,  but  what 
this  great  will  was  that  had  him  in  its  grasp,  that  compelled 
him  to  work,  that  saved  him  from  drowning  in  his  individual 
sorrows  and  cares,  he  could  not  say.  It  was  easy  to  draw 
the  analogy  that  a  man  is  an  atom  in  the  life  of  the  species 
as  a  cell  is  an  atom  in  the  life  of  a  man.  But  this  again 
was  not  the  complete  truth.  Where  was  this  alleged  will 
of  the  species?  If  there  was  indeed  such  a  will  in  the  spe- 
cies, why  was  there  this  war?  And  yet,  whatever  it  might 
be,  assuredly  there  was  something  greater  than  himself  sus- 
taining his  life.  .  .  .  To  him  it  felt  like  a  universal  thing, 
but  was  it  indeed  a  universal  thing?  It  was  strangely  bound 
up  with  preferences.  Why  did  he  love  and  choose  certain 
things  passionately?  Why  was  he  indifferent  to  others? 


OSWALD'S  VALEDICTION  593 

Why  were  Dolly  and  Joan  more  beautiful  to  him  than  any 
other  women;  why  did  he  so  love  the  sound  of  their  voices, 
their  movements,  and  the  subtle  lines  of  their  faces;  why 
did  he  love  Peter,  standing  upright  and  when  enthusiasm 
lit  him;  and  why  did  he  love  the  lights  on  polished  steel 
and  the  darknesses  of  deep  waters,  the  movements  of  flames, 
and  of  supple,  feline  animals,  so  intensely  ?  Why  did  he  love 
these  things  more  than  the  sheen  on  painted  wood,  or  the 
graces  of  blonde  women,  or  the  movements  of  horses?  And 
why  did  he  love  justice  and  the  revelation  of  scientific  laws, 
and  the  setting  right  of  disordered  things?  Why  did  this 
idea  of  a  League  of  Nations  come  to  him  with  the  effect 
of  a  personal  and  preferential  call?  All  these  lights  and 
matters  and  aspects  and  personal  traits  were  somehow  con- 
nected in  his  mind,  and  had  a  compelling  power  over  him. 
They  could  make  him  forget  his  safety  or  comfort  or  happi- 
ness. They  had  something  in  common  among  themselves,  he 
felt,  and  he  could  not  tell  what  it  was  they  had  in  common. 
But  whatever  it  was,  it  was  the  intimation  of  the  power  that 
sustained  him.  It  was  as  if  they  were  all  reflections  or  re- 
semblances of  some  overruling  spirit,  some  Genius,  some 
great  ruler  of  the  values  that  stood  over  his  existence  and  his 
world.  Yet  that  again  was  but  a  fancy — a  plagiarism  from 
Socrates.  .  .  . 

There  was  a  light  upon  his  life,  and  the  truth  was  that  he 
could  not  discover  the  source  of  the  light  nor  define  its  na- 
ture ;  there  was  a  presence  in  the  world  about  him  that  made 
all  life  worth  while,  and  yet  it  was  Nameless  and  Incompre- 
hensible. It  was  the  Essence  beyond  Reality;  it  was  the 
Heart  of  All  Things.  .  .  .  Metaphors!  Words!  Perhaps 
some  men  have  meant  this  when  they  talked  of  Love,  but  he 
himself  had  loved  because  of  this,  and  so  he  held  it  must  be 
something  greater  than  Love.  Perhaps  some  men  have  in- 
tended it  in  their  use  of  the  word  Beauty,  but  it  seemed  to 
him  that  rather  it  made  and  determined  Beauty  for  him. 
And  others  again  have  known  it  as  the  living  presence  of 
God,  but  the  name  of  God  was  to  Oswald  a  name  battered 
out  of  all  value  and  meaning.  And  yet  it  was  by  this,  by 
this  Nameless,  this  Incomprehensible,  that  he  lived  and  was 
upheld.  It  did  so  uphold  him  that  he  could  go  on,  he  knew, 


594  JOAN  AND  PETER 

though  happiness  were  denied  him ;  though  defeat  and  death 
stared  him  in  the  face.  .  .  . 


§  11 

At  last  he  sighed  and  rose.  He  lit  his  reading  lamp  by 
means  of  a  newspaper  rolled  up  into  one  long  spill — for  there 
was  a  famine  in  matches  just  then — and  sat  down  to  the 
work  on  his  desk. 


THE   END 


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